Question

I have written an Office shared Add-in with C# and .NET 2.0. It uses the same COM Shim for all office apps. Currently, every instance creates its own instance of my class — they have no knowledge of the fact that the add-in is running on another application.

Is it possible to make it so that, say, when the Word add-in launches it can detect that the Excel add-in is already running? Can they communicate between each other?

Let’s say my dll is called Addin.dll. When, for example, Word opens, it runs the code in Addin.dll that implements the IExtensibility interface, and creates a class, let’s call it WordAddin. When Excel opens, it also runs the code in Addin.dll, and it creates an instance of ExcelAddin. Now, suppose that Word is running and WordAddin exists. When Excel is opened, Addin.dll is loaded into a different AppDomain. It has no knowledge that WordAddin exists. I want ExcelAddin to have know WordAddin exists, and be able to communicate with it, perhaps through a parent class that creates both.

Anyone know how to do this?

Answer 1

I ended up using named pipes to communicate between processes