R – Can a .NET Word 2003 add-in be installed outside of the GAC

gacms-wordnet

I've created a Word add-in component, and a visual studio setup project to install the component.

On a clean machine with Office 2003 installed, it does not seem to be possible to get the add-in component to load in Word.

Googling the issue suggests that this is because the assembly is not trusted. I gave the assembly full trust using the command line tool:

caspol -af AssemblyName.dll

This makes no difference and the compenent is still not loaded in Word. caspol prints out a message "Because all GAC assemblies always get full trust, the full trust list is no
longer meaningful. You should install any assemblies that are used in security
policy in the GAC to ensure they are trusted"

Changing the installer to put the assembly in the GAC allows it to correctly load in Word. But the component may have to use common assemblies in the future, shared between our other .NET applications, and adding these libraries to the GAC would be undesirable.

Does anyone know how to set the security to allow the component to be loaded when installed outside the GAC?

Best Answer

You can manually run the following command to set security to allow the word to run the assembly from outside the GAC. This creates a new group with full trust which is what allows the assembly to run.

caspol.exe -u -addgroup All_Code -url "\*"  FullTrust -n AssemblyName.dll

Microsoft have an example custom action for an installer at the following site link to MSDN, which will allow you to include this command as an installer custom action.

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C# – Should ‘using’ directives be inside or outside the namespace

There is actually a (subtle) difference between the two. Imagine you have the following code in File1.cs:

// File1.cs
using System;
namespace Outer.Inner
{
    class Foo
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            double d = Math.PI;
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Now imagine that someone adds another file (File2.cs) to the project that looks like this:

// File2.cs
namespace Outer
{
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The compiler searches Outer before looking at those using directives outside the namespace, so it finds Outer.Math instead of System.Math. Unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately?), Outer.Math has no PI member, so File1 is now broken.

This changes if you put the using inside your namespace declaration, as follows:

// File1b.cs
namespace Outer.Inner
{
    using System;
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Now the compiler searches System before searching Outer, finds System.Math, and all is well.

Some would argue that Math might be a bad name for a user-defined class, since there's already one in System; the point here is just that there is a difference, and it affects the maintainability of your code.

It's also interesting to note what happens if Foo is in namespace Outer, rather than Outer.Inner. In that case, adding Outer.Math in File2 breaks File1 regardless of where the using goes. This implies that the compiler searches the innermost enclosing namespace before it looks at any using directive.

Best Answer

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