Although VS 2015 removed support for add-ins and the Tools > Add-In Manager of past versions was removed, there is still at least one place where its past existence surfaces:
Click the Tools > Customize… menu to show the Customize dialog and click the Commands tab:
Then click the Add Command… button and you will see the Addins item in the Categories list:
I have reported this minor bug on Microsoft Connect.
Being quite a perfectionist, there was one issue in older versions of my MZ-Tools 8.0 add-in for VBA that was not right for me: it required .NET Framework 2.0, which is installed by default on Windows 7, but not on Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10, it’s an optional feature:
So, installing MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA on Windows 8.0 or higher likely you would get this dialog:
And then the user should download and install .NET Framework 2.0. Needless to say, this is mostly inconvenient and can hurt sales, so I thought it would be nice if MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA could use whatever higher .NET Framework was installed on Windows (such as .NET Framework 4.0 on Windows 8 or higher).
Before digging on how this can be done, some basics: a .NET Framework is composed of a Common Language Runtime (CLR), which contains the virtual machine for .NET, with the JIT compiler, garbage collector, etc. and a set of libraries. So:
.NET Framework = CLR + libraries
There are three kinds of .NET Frameworks:
A native process (such as an Office app) must load a CLR in order to load a managed (.NET) add-in. CLRs 1.0, 1.1 and 2.0 cannot coexist in the same process, that is, once of those CLRs is loaded, no other CLR version can be loaded in the same process. However, CLR 4.0 can coexist with CLR 2.0 in the same process.
Note: from this point, I will talk only about CLR 2.0 / CLR 4.0 (.NET Framework 2.0 or higher).
So, there are two aspects that an add-in for VBA must consider:
Now the question is: given a native process that must load a .NET-based add-in, which CLR version does it use?.
An .exe process can have an .exe.config file that specifies the supported/required runtimes of the .NET Framework. Visual Studio uses such .config files but Office apps don’t, so they don’t care about CLR versions (they can use CLR 2.0, CLR 4.0, or even both at the same time). By no means an add-in should install an .exe.config file to modify the behavior of an Office application regarding supported/required CLRs, because it can break other add-ins.
However, there are still two approaches that an add-in written against .NET 2.0 (or .NET 3.x, which also uses CLR 2.0) can use to work with CLR 2.0 on systems that have it installed (such as Windows 7) and with CLR 4.0 on systems that don’t have CLR 2.0 installed but have CLR 4.0 installed (such as Windows 8, Windows 8.1 or Windows 10):
The first approach is to make the setup to detect which CLR versions are installed on the system:
Note: to register the assembly for COM Interop, the setup cannot use regasm.exe, not even the version of .NET 4.0 (C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319\regasm.exe) because regasm.exe sets always the Runtimeversion value to the value of the CLR that the assembly was compiled against. Instead, the setup must create the registry entries for COM Interop directly (see the required entries here).
The second approach is to use a COM Shim, which I explained in Isolating .NET-based add-ins for the VBA editor with COM Shims. Since a COM Shim is a native C++ dll that loads the CLR to create a custom AppDomain and to load the assembly, it can decide which CLR version to load, depending on which CLRs are installed on the machine: if CLR 2.0 is installed, it loads it, and if CLR 2.0 is not installed but CLR 4.0 is installed, it loads CLR 4.0.
Recently I got a bug report from a customer of my MZ-Tools 8.0 add-in for VBA stating that it crashed the VBA editor of Autodesk Inventor 2016. If he uninstalled MZ-Tools, the problem disappeared. This user has been using MZ-Tools 8.0 for months but now, suddenly, this problem appeared.
I downloaded the trial version of Autodesk Inventor 2017 and I was able to reproduce the problem. This was the first window of the crash:
Clicking the View Report Details more info was shown:
So, it was an unhandled exception. The dmpuserinfo.xml contained the stack trace:
So, when MZ-Tools shows a modal window, Autodesk Inventor tries to set a “quick access toolbar gradient color” using a function that crashes the app. Initially I thought (and so it was reported) that the crash happened only when MZ-Tools was set to load on startup, but not when loaded manually using the Add-In Manager. However, I realized that it happened at any time that MZ-Tools tried to show a modal dialog.
What could be causing this after months of normal usage? My main suspect was the COM Shim that I introduced in build 8.0.0.77 (June 1) to provide proper isolation from other .NET-based add-ins for the VBA editor. And certainly the hypothesis was correct. When I ran MZ-Tools without the COM Shim, the problem didn’t happen. So, it seems that WinForms dialogs don’t play well when loaded from a different AppDomain. The several Office apps and versions don’t suffer this problem, but Autodesk Inventor does. Although I reported the problem to Autodesk, I guess that likely they won’t fix it, or anyway the existing released Autodesk Inventor 2016 and 2017 builds will persist with the problem. So, as a workaround, the new setup of MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA will detect if Autodesk products are installed. In that case, the setup won’t register MZ-Tools using the COM Shim.
Office 2010 introduced the 64-bit version, which supports only 64-bit COM add-ins. This meant that all add-ins created with VB6 for its VBA editor stopped to work, because they are 32-bit add-ins. The only possibilities to create 64-bit add-ins are using C++ 64-bit, or using .NET x64 and COM Interop. So, it is not a surprise that quite a few add-ins for the VBA editor are created now using .NET. I wrote the article HOWTO: Create an add-in for the VBA editor (32-bit or 64-bit) of Office with Visual Studio .NET back in 2012 along with a few others referenced at the end of that article. One thing that many developers of add-ins for the VBA editor may not know is that by default all .NET-based add-ins are loaded in the same AppDomain (a .NET concept for isolation of assemblies), and therefore are not properly isolated. A couple of bad things that can happen are the following:
So, how are both problems solved? The solution is well-known for developers of add-ins for Office applications using .NET since 2002 or 2003, through the use of a COM Shim. A COM Shim is an ActiveX dll, written in C++, that acts as a native add-in, and loads the Common Language Runtime (CLR) of .NET, creates an AppDomain, and loads the .NET-based add-in. Calls to the native C++ add-in (OnConnection, OnDisconnection, etc.) are passed to the managed (.NET) add-in.
If you are a developer of .NET-based add-ins for the VBA editor, the following are the MSDN articles that you need to read, understand and apply for your add-in to be a good citizen, running isolated from other add-ins in its own AppDomain. When reading the articles, replace “add-in for Office” or “Office extension” by “add-in for VBA editor”:
Isolating Office Extensions with the COM Shim Wizard
This article is relevant because it explains all about isolation and COM Shims.
Isolating Microsoft Office Extensions with the COM Shim Wizard Version 2.0 (VS 2005)
This article is relevant because it doesn’t use the Managed Aggregator introduced in next version 2.3. Add-ins don’t require “aggregation”, just “containment” is required.
Isolating Microsoft Office Extensions with the COM Shim Wizard Version 2.3 (VS 2008)
This article is relevant because it uses “aggregation” instead of “containment”, and you need to realize that add-ins don’t require “aggregation” and you can remove with some adjustments the ManagedAggregator project and its output assembly.
COM Shim Wizards for VS 2010 (2.3.2.0)
This article is relevant because it’s the latest available COM Shim wizard with bug fixes, yet using “aggregation”. I used this and then removed “aggregation” to use “containment” of version 2.0.
Taking COM Shim Wizards to 64-bit
This article is relevant because it explains how to port the COM Shim to 64-bit.
There are two ways of knowing which AppDomain an add-in is loaded into:
Using Process Explorer, you can use the .NET Assemblies tab of the properties window of a process. For example, this image shows that MZ-Tools is loaded in its own MZToolsAppDomain using CLR 4.0:
For some reason that I don’t know, Process Explorer doesn’t show AppDomains for CLR 2.0:
The other way is calling from the own add-in System.AppDomain.CurrentDomain and showing its FriendlyName property. This image shows the MZ-Tools uses its own MZToolsAppDomain for CLR 2.0 (that Process Explorer didn’t show):
If not using the COM Shim, the AppDomain is the DefaultDomain:
One of the confusing aspects when you create a new Visual Studio package is that there seems to be many places where a version number appears. They are the following:
2. The version on the Help > About dialog:
3. The version on the deployment folder:
4. The version of the file:
5. The version of the assembly:
All those five versions are set in four places, that are the following:
1. The version on the Tools > Extensions and Updates dialog and the version on the deployment folder are the same version and it is set in the source.extension.vsixmanifest file, Version field. It is recommended (in my opinion) to set it to the file version (4 numbers):
2. The version on the Help > About dialog is set in the package class, InstalledProductRegistration attribute. It is recommended to set the same value than in the previous point, so that the Help > About and the Tools > Extensions and Updates dialogs show the same value:
3. The version of the file is set in the AssemblyInfo.cs file, AssemblyFileVersion attribute. This file version is a Win32 concept (not a .NET concept) and it is best practice to change it on each build:
4. The version of the assembly is set in the AssemblyInfo.cs file, AssemblyVersion attribute. This assembly version is a .NET concept and it is not required to change it on each build:
Note: to learn the difference between Assembly File Version and Assembly version read the Knowledge Base Community article How to use Assembly Version and Assembly File Version.
Yesterday I got this error when loading my add-in MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA:
I hate that error. The VBA and VB6 IDEs hide valuable information about why an add-in couldn’t be loaded. In Visual Studio you get at least a COM error number (the error message is almost always <Unknown error> for COM errors):
And you have this article of mine explaining most causes given an error number: HOWTO: Troubleshooting Visual Studio and Office add-ins.
But for VB6/VBA, you are clueless. I have got that error many times because my MZ-Tools add-in is supported in several IDEs using different approaches for registration for the end user (using a setup) and for myself during development/debugging (using PowerShell scripts for registration/unregistration).
For the end user (using a setup):
For development/debugging (using PowerShell scripts):
All this means that any error using the wrong registration or running Visual Studio, VB6 or Office with the wrong elevation (or lack of), and I get the dreaded “MZ-Tools 8.0 could not be loaded”.
In those cases, I need to use Process Monitor (see HOWTO: Using the Process Monitor (ProcMon) tool to diagnose Visual Studio add-ins problems) to try to guess which registry entry or file is causing a problem. In this case, I got this:
So, the dll of the add-in was not found. But, wait a minute: it is looking for it in the path “C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Local\MZTools Software\MZTools8VBA\”, which is used for the end user (setup), not in the path used during development. I went to the Control Panel, Program and Features, and MZ-Tools 8.0 was not installed!. So, somehow the last uninstallation of the setup failed silently, removing the file but leaving the COM-registration in the Windows registry. How could that be? I test the setups and PowerShell scripts exhaustively when created/modified and they were working correctly for weeks since the last changes.
Then, suddenly, I remembered something. I am using Windows 10, and I always use the “Control Panel”, “Program and Features” item to uninstall the software, because I like colors and I am not a fan of the new bland “Settings” > “System” > “Apps and features” user interface of Windows 10. But the day before, I used the “Apps and features” to uninstall MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA, maybe because I guess that the Control Panel will be removed at some point since it seems a remaining duplicated thing. So, after some manual cleaning of registry entries, I tried again to install and uninstall using the setup (using “Settings” > “System” > “Apps and features”) and then to register for development using the PowerShell script and the problem was reproduced. One try again and I realized the cause:
It happens that some users of MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA run Office with admin rights (I don’t know really why they want that), and therefore if MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA runs with per-user COM-registration, it doesn’t work. So I changed the setup of MZ-Tools 8.0 for VBA some months ago to behave as follows:
And then it happens that on Windows 10, if you use the “Settings” > “System” > “Apps and features” to uninstall, the uninstaller is elevated to use admin rights (even if it was installed without admin rights) and it removes the non-existent machine-wide COM-registration, leaving intact the existing per-user COM-registration that was created when installed without admin rights. When the PowerShell script registers the add-in using machine-wide COM-registration, two COM-registrations are in place. If I run Office with admin rights, the machine-wide COM-registration is used and it works. But if I run Office without admin rights, the per-user COM-registration that shouldn’t be there takes precedence, and points to a file that was uninstalled, so the error.
Now I have to modify the uninstaller to remove also the per-user COM-registration even if running with admin rights.
I have received a couple of issues in the last days from users of my MZ-Tools package, reporting that it keeps disabled, they have to enable it, and when restarting Visual Studio 2015 it happens again.
I haven’t seen that issue, so I could not investigate on my computer, but searching the web I found this post of MVP fellow David Gardiner that explains that the issue can happen to any extension and he provides a solution:
Web Essentials 2015 extension keeps being disabled
So far my users have confirmed the solution. Thanks David!
I am these weeks pushing all my dev teams (near 40 people) of my daily job to upgrade from old versions of Visual Studio (2003-2013) to Visual Studio 2015, and all I hear from the first people taking the task are horror stories about the VS 2015 taking “hours” to install or “the whole day”. Their laptops are not more than 3 years old (my company renews them after that period) but I know they have 4 GB of memory, and most importantly, HDD disks instead of SSDs. I will try to convince management to pay the hardware upgrades to 8 GB of memory and SSD disks, but the VS 2015 setup experience couldn’t be worse for them. I will also take a look at why it takes so long on their computers, because they were instructed to install only the required components (desktop and web development with VB.NET/C#) and in my experience that should not take more than 1 hour on a computer with a HDD disk. I bought myself a Microsoft Surface 4 Pro for work some months ago and I think that VS 2015 installed in “only” 30 minutes, which surprised me a lot.
Microsoft is well aware of the painful setup experience for Visual Studio since long time ago, and they have decided to improve it a lot in the new VS “15” (not to be confused with VS 2015) with a new minimal install, optional “Stacks” or “Workloads” (name still to be decided), and isolated, low-impact, MSI-free, GAC-free, registry-free components:
This was a first post on the Visual Studio blog: Faster, Leaner, Focused on Your Development Needs: The New Visual Studio Installer. And today there is a new post: On the Road to Release: Redesigning Visual Studio Installation that provides a couple of interesting things:
There is another very strange issue that I saw long time ago but until this week I hadn’t seen it again. It happens when you try to convert a Visual Studio 2010 package project to Visual Studio 2015. The steps to reproduce it are the following:
Interestingly, the problem doesn’t happen if you migrate first the VS Package project from VS 2010 to VS 2012, and then from VS 2012 to VS 2015 (I cannot test with VS 2013 because I cannot install the VS 2013 SDK on Windows 10). It doesn’t happen either if you create the package with VS 2012 and you migrate it to VS 2015.
As I said, I saw this problem for the first time long time ago (I think last year), migrating my own MZ-Tools package. I don’t remember how I solved it, but likely I created a new package with VS 2012 or VS 2013.
This week I received an email about converting the DAX editor for SQL Server, which is VS 2010-based, and whose code is available on CodePlex, to support SQL Server 2016. My first suggestion was to convert the VS package project to VS 2015. When I tried it, I got the error about .vsct file in use by another project. And this time I was decided to investigate the cause.
First, I tried to guess which was the other process that was preventing the Visual Studio process (devenv.exe) to migrate the project. Using Process Monitor or Process Explorer didn’t show any suspect. Being involved the .vsct file, my main suspect was the VS Command Table compiler (vsct.exe) but I couldn’t verify, and I was not sure if that VSCT compiler was involved in the migration phase (definitely it’s involved in the build phase).
Second, I compared patiently each line of the .csproj of the migrated package project with the .csproj of my own MZ-Tools package, removing or changing lines until both were virtually identical. Still the error.
Third, while the error was still shown, I tried to edit the .vsct file with a text editor and save it (successfully) and even rename the file (also successfully), so apparently the .vsct file was not in use at all.
Now what? Suddenly I had the magic idea of replacing the .vsct file of the migrated project by the one of my MZ-Tools package, and this time the project loaded, no longer “unavailable”. So the problem was inside the .vsct file. Again patiently I started to comment/remove sections of the .vsct file, and again and again, and the problem persisted. Eventually, the .vsct file had only 6 lines (the “extern href” lines) and the problem persisted!:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?> <CommandTable xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005-10-18/CommandTable" xmlns:xs="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"> <Extern href="stdidcmd.h"/> <Extern href="vsshlids.h"/> <Extern href="msobtnid.h"/> </CommandTable>
And finally, as soon as I removed the msobtnid.h extern declaration, the problem was solved. That file contains the “Definition of some VSCT specific constants. In this sample we use it for the IDs inside the guidOfficeIcon group”. The VS 2012 package wizard (and higher) no longer includes it in the .vsct file, which explains that migrating a package from VS 2012 to VS 2015 doesn’t suffer this issue. One thing remains: the migration to VS 2015 doesn’t remove that “extern href” (so the problem happens), but does the migration to VS 2012 remove it? The answer is yes, that line is commented after the migration from VS 2010 to VS 2012:
<!--Definition of some VSCT specific constants. In this sample we use it for the IDs inside the guidOfficeIcon group. --> <!--<Extern href="msobtnid.h" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2005-10-18/CommandTable" />-->
So, Microsoft knew about that problem in VS 2012, likely VS 2013 doesn’t suffer the problem either because the package wizard is the same, but somehow they forgot in VS 2015, which uses a different package wizard.
It remains to be explained why the error message is so misleading but my patience with this issue is depleted and now that I know the solution and it’s documented here for other VSX developers I am more than satisfied.
I think I never reported this problem, neither on Microsoft Connect nor on this blog (it seems that I have been very busy last months…), but I have reproduced it on my two Windows 10 machines. When I try to install the VS 2013 SDK on Windows 10, I get the following error:
Setup Blocked
“Windows Program Compatibility mode is on. Turn it off and then try Setup again.”
And here it is the screenshot:
The Compatibility Mode is not activated:
When I activate it, running the vssdk2013_full.exe setup with the “Troubleshoot compatibility” context menu, the setup is run with Windows 8 compatibility but still I get the same error.
I don’t know if I am the only VSX developer in the world with this problem (I haven’t seen it reported) but anyway today I have opened a bug report on Microsoft Connect, which includes the screenshot and the log file. If this problem happens to you, now you know you are not alone. I don’t have a solution or workaround, though.
UPDATE (Jun 16): Thanks to Mister Magoo for pointing in the comments that the problem is that I renamed the setup file from vssdk_full.exe to vssdk2013_full.exe.