Office Shared Add-ins: Issues - Part 1

1. PIA (Primary Interop Assemblies)
   
   The PIA needs to be installed/registered on the target machine
   Office 2003 | Office 2007
   
   Note: You will notice if you use any of the office interop's the setup includes the PIA assemblies within the "Detected Dependencies" of your setup - you will need to exclude them (right click on the assembly, click on exclude), since we're going to use the assemblies registered/installed to the GAC.
   
   It makes sense to include PIA as prerequisite in your setup.
   Click here for more information.
   
   
2. Disabled
   
   Handling exceptions in our add-in is paramount.
   
   Office applications disable add-ins that misbehaves, there are two methods of disabling add-ins - according to the severity of the misbehavior.
   
   If an add-in causes Office to crash for example, the add-in gets hard-disabled, if an add-in crashes without managing to crash Office, the add-in gets soft-disabled.
   
   Its possible to re-enable the add-in via the Office interface, or by changing registry entries.
   
   For hard-disabled add-ins, one can simply delete the resiliency key, in the following key 12.0 is the office version, and "Word" the office application.
   
   

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\12.0\Word\Resiliency

   
   For soft-disabled add-ins you need to set the LoadBehavior of an add-in from 2 (unloaded) to 3 (loaded), depending on if the add-in was installed only for the current user or all users, you can find the LoadBehavior inside one of the following keys:
   

   HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\SomeAddin

   HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Word\Addins\SomeAddin

3. Profiles
   
   During install an user's got the option to install the add-in for the all profiles or only the current profile - which obviously makes the add-in unavailable to other profiles.
   
   
4. References
   
   We need to ensure that all assemblies required to run the add-in is available, this is something one can include in our primary output (if possible) of our setup or as a prerequisite.
   
   Assuming that we're using .NET, we need to ensure that we've got the correct version of the framework on the target machine - which we can include as prerequisite.
   
   
5. Other Add-ins
   
   In the case of shared add-ins developed in .NET, you'll find that add-ins run on the mscoree which is like an universal "shim" - which means that other add-ins running on this "shim" (same app pool) may affect our add-in negatively.
   
   It might become prudent to develop your own "shims"
   
   

Microsoft Dynamics CRM 4.0: C# - Add file to an account

 
CrmService crmService = new CrmService();
 
void Authenticate()
{
    CrmAuthenticationToken token = new CrmAuthenticationToken();
    token.AuthenticationType = 0;
    token.OrganizationName = "CSTruter";
    crmService.Credentials = System.Net.CredentialCache.DefaultCredentials;
    crmService.CrmAuthenticationTokenValue = token;
}
 

1. That we have/know the organization
2. Know the location of the WebService for that organization
3. That we're running in context of an user authenticated against active directory(known as On-premise authentication in CRM)

 
BusinessEntity[] GetAccount(string value)
{
	ConditionExpression condition = new ConditionExpression
	{
		AttributeName = "name",
		Operator = ConditionOperator.Equal,
		Values = new object[] { value }
	};
 
	QueryExpression query = new QueryExpression
	{
		EntityName = "account",
		ColumnSet = new ColumnSet
		{
			Attributes = new string[] { "name", "accountid" }
		},
		Criteria = new FilterExpression
		{
			Conditions = new ConditionExpression[] { condition }
		}
	};
 
	return crmService.RetrieveMultiple(query).BusinessEntities;
}
 

 
Guid? AddAttachment(string filename, EntityName ObjectType, string ObjectId)
{
    FileInfo fileInfo = new FileInfo(filename);
 
    if (fileInfo.Exists)
    {
        TargetCreateAnnotation target = new TargetCreateAnnotation
        {
            Annotation = new annotation
            {
                filename = fileInfo.Name,
                isdocument = new CrmBoolean { Value = true },
                documentbody = Convert.ToBase64String(File.ReadAllBytes(filename)),
                mimetype = "application/octet-stream",
                objectid = new Lookup
                {
                    type = "annotation",
                    Value = new Guid(ObjectId)
                },
                objecttypecode = new EntityNameReference { Value = ObjectType.ToString() }
            }
        };
 
        CreateRequest request = new CreateRequest { Target = target };
        CreateResponse response = (CreateResponse)crmService.Execute(request);
        return response.id;
    }
    return null;
}
 
 

 
static void Main(string[] args)
{
    Authenticate();
 
    string somedoc = @"c:\6.xls";
    BusinessEntity[] account = GetAccount("dude");
    if (account.Length > 0)
    {
        string accountid = ((account)account[0]).accountid.Value.ToString();
        AddAttachment(somedoc, EntityName.account, accountid);
    }
}