Question

I have created a outlook add-in and need to create a setup to make it distributable (i am new to this so pls excuse the novice comments )

Outlook -2010
Vs  -2010
.Net 4.0

I read some where ,the easiest way to do this would be to just publish. And yes it was that easy. The setup was created and i could install.
The catch ,was that in systems which did not have .net 4.0 (or maybe VS 2010), the setup began installing the framework first (which is good .. :)) on restarting system (on complete installation of 4.0).
When user tries to install the setup it gives error saying :

the following solution cannnot be loaded because Microsoft Office
support for the .Net framework 4.0 is not installed

The users machine had Outlook 2010 and framework 3.5 initially. I checked and 4.0 client was installed (33 MB approx).

Answer 1

I experienced the same issue recently and had to install Visual Studio 2010 Tools for Office Runtime on the client workstations before installing my add-in. After installing it I was immediately able to install my add-in without a reboot.

According to this [post][3] from the VSTO team:

Note that in the Beta and RTM
releases of Office 2010 you will NOT
get Office 4.0 Runtime Extensions (or
the capability for them to be “turned
on”). If you are deploying
customizations that target .Net
Framework 4 and they will run on
Office 2010 you will need your users
to install the VSTO 2010 Runtime
redistributable (and of course before
their customization will run they will
have to install .Net Framework 4).