I've created a managed addin for Excel. It uses the COM Shim Wizard to create a COM automation addin which can be registered with Excel, and that proxies to the managed code. This code all works great on development systems that have VS2005 installed but it doesn't work on testing systems that do not have the development tools.
I've follow the advice and directions found in dozens of websites and forums. I've written a complete tutorial in my blog to describe how to get all of the code to work. I've documented the experience of hunting for solutions, trying and failing with bad advice, and finding corrections to popular code that's now years old. The information I have provided is a goldmine for anyone else going down this path - considering all of the other calls for assistance I've seen out there on this very topic. When the final solution is found to the deployment issue we'll all have a definitive end-to-end solution documented in one place. I've traced the issue down to missing registry keys in the deployment systems (documented in the blog). I believe these keys are supposed to be created by the COM Shim Wizard or by the VS Setup project - but I'm not sure this is all that's missing. I believe I'm missing something because I don't see anyone else doing this sort of work talking about manually defining a bunch of registry keys.
I'm hoping someone else can read the material, follow the tutorial, try to deploy, and help to find out what needs to be done. Or maybe someone can point to another solution that's down a completely different path. I know the COM Shim Wizard is unsupported, but if it's not doing what it should then what good is it, and wouldn't the maintainers want to know that something is wrong? If there is some other bug somewhere, let's find it. I'll do all of the legwork and testing theories but I need some knowledgable collaboration. It's very time consuming to tweak here, deploy there, and then try to diagnose issues. I've spent close to 200 hours on this. I think I've done my due dilligence and now I'm asking for help.
I've been asking about this in forums for so long that I feel like a whiny little newb but you'll see from my blog this isn't the case.
Thanks for any comments or assistance - and thanks just for reading this.
Tony Gravagno, Nebula Research and Development
Technical Editor, C#Builder KickStart, SAMS Publishing
Technical Editor, C++/CLI In Action, Manning
Technical Editor, C#Unleashed Second Edition, SAMS, (current effort)
http://nebula-rnd.com/blog/tech/2007/12/excel-tools6.html