Home/ Questions/Q 9081615
In Process

The Archive Base Latest Questions

Editorial Team
  • 0
Asked: 2026-06-16T20:21:25+00:00

I’ve created my first Office Add-in using Visual Studio. It targets the 4.0 .Net

  • 0

I’ve created my first Office Add-in using Visual Studio. It targets the 4.0 .Net framework and was created using the new VS 2012. I need to distribute/install this project on various 32-bit XP and 64-bit Windows 7 computers around the office. So I configured the project to be installed on XP (which was my first speed bump because I didn’t realize VS 2012 needed an update in order to make a solution that was XP compatible). Now that I have a valid win32 application, I am getting another error:

The following error occurred attempting to install ‘C:\filepath…\Import Contacts.vsto’:
“No application is associated with the specified file for this operation.”

After doing some digging, I think I need to install the Microsoft Visual Studio Tools for Office Runtime on the client computer. To do this, I would like to use the prerequisites properties for the project. So I read up on creating custom prerequisites using some noteworthy sites (e.g, Creating Bootstrapper Packages, Application Deployment Prerequisites, Adding Custom Prerequisites, and Creating a Bootstrapper package for Office 2013 in Visual Studio 2012). I created the files according to that last URL (even though I’m not sure it pertains to the package I need just yet), but it is not appearing in the dialog box under Project > Properties > Publish > Prerequisites

If you read the article, it says the VS prerequisites dialog box should automatically update once I restart VS 2012, which I did but to no avail. I know I’ll need to use this feature again in the future, so I would really like to know what I’m doing wrong and fix this. Please help! And I promise to quickly give the ACCEPT to whoever helps me fix this problem! Thank you in advance.

Share

Leave an answer

You must login to add an answer.

Need An Account,

1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    I didn’t have any problems following the directions given in the web page and got the bootstrapper added to the Prerequisites dialog. However, there are plenty of possible ways to get it wrong. Some possibilities:

    • Triple-check the folder you added these files to. Be sure that you picked Program Files (x86) on a 64-bit version of Windows and not Program Files. And be sure that you now see the added VSTOR40 folder along with the other existing bootstrapper folders, like ReportViewer and VBPowerPacks.
    • You do not have write permission to this folder, UAC prevents copying files there. Be sure that you managed to copy them from, say, an elevated command prompt. Right-click the Command Prompt shortcut and click “Run as Administrator”.
    • If you created the .xml files with Notepad then make sure you didn’t accidentally saved them with the .txt extension. If necessary, put Explorer in “programmer mode” so you can see the filename extensions. Control Panel + Folder Options, View tab, untick the “Hide extensions for known file types” checkbox. If you now see product.xml.txt then rename the file to product.xml, same for package.xml.txt
    • If you created the .xml files with Notepad then be sure to save the file in UTF-8 encoding. File + Save As, Encoding combobox.
    • 0