COM Add-in Shim issues

[pavan]

Hi All,
Few months back we had built a unmanaged Shim for our COM Add-in. We
built a custom setup and installed and everything was working fine. So
forth so good.

Now while deploying our add-in in Office XP we need to make sure that
the add-in loads even if the user uncheks "Trust all installed Addins
and Templates" from Tools -> Macro -> Security. To achieve this we need
to authenticode sign the shim dll. We did the same, and even
authenticode signed our com add-in dll. When we uncheck the check box
and test the add-in doesn't load. LoadBehavior is 3, which tells that
there nothing wrong with the code. The add-in works when we check the
check box. So, nothing wrong with the code.

Upon analysis, we found that in HKCR, the registry entry for the add-in
still shows mscoree.dll. We presume that it should actually be our shim
dll. It is not! So, it looks like our add-in is still being loaded by
mscoree.dll which is not authenticode signed and hence our add-in
doesn't work when the checkbox is unchecked.

Any pointers towards it will be of great help
We are really stuck and need to get this resolved asap
Thanks

 

[XL-Dennis]

pavan,

I recently wrote 9 articles about creating and deploying 'managed' COM
add-ins with VB.NET 2005. It includes 'shimming' as well and also points to
two important articles by Andrew WhiteChapel, MSFT.

Here is the startpage for the articles:
http://www.excelkb.com/article.aspx?id=10204

Let us know how it progress.