I’m not talking about calling a VBA COM from C#… the other way around!
What I would like to do is call a C# library using VBA in MS Access without registering the DLL. I’ve been playing around with side-by-side interop for a while without success and it has finally occurred to me that a mdb.manifest is probably not an acceptable replacement for an exe.manifest (probably obvious, I know, but I was trying to be optimistic).
My question: Is it possible to get VBA to load a side-by-side COM component?
Or, is there another way to use an unregistered C# library in Access?
(Before you ask, my reasons are: there is absolutely no way I will be granted access to my client’s Windows registry — that’s why it was written in Access in the first place. And, I will need to implement the same functionality in a C# application soon and rather not do it twice).
You don’t have to own the exe to use SxS, SxS is another word for Activation Context.
If you can import the relevant win32 calls into vba (and you can), then you can use the activation context api to load your manifest file.
More on the subject and some examples can be found here.