I have a com add-in created with VB 6 which works fine on all XP machines with MapPoint 2006, but when I try to add it to MapPoint 2006 on a Vista machine, I get an error that ..."is not a valid Office Add-in"

I can not find any explanation on the Internet and am assuming that Vista won't work with a VB 6 com add-in and I must reprogram it in VB.net. Unfortunately, MSDN's "Creating Com Add-ins" example is still using VB 6 and VB.net appears to be drastically different (I have no vb.net experience).

Create COM add-ins in Visual Basic

Any idea on why I'm getting the error on vista and if it is because the com add-in needs to be in VB.net, where I would find an example vb.net com add-in?

Thanks,
Doug

It isn't the language, as I have two VB6 add-ins that I've tested in MapPoint.
I'm not sure what I would be doing that is different - they're wrapped in a third party security library (which will tend to cause problems rather than solve them!). The installer is code signed, but the add-ins themselves are not.


Richard

Since it is not the VB6 language, I thought maybe Vista was requiring the dll to be signed so I purchased a code signing cert and signed the dll but still get the same error.

Again, the add-in installs and works fine in MapPoint 2006 on XP. I am only getting the error in MapPoint 2006 on Vista.

"C:\EMRI-MP\WebAddin.dll" is not a valid Office add-in.

Any input would be apreciated.

Thanks,
Doug

It appears to be a bug with MapPoint/Vista with the manual adding of add-ins as I installed the PushPin Tool from Mapping-Tools.com via its Setup program and the add-in worked. When I removed the add-in though and tried to add it back via the manual process I was given the same error.

Anyone know where to take this problem to find out a fix?

More likely to be Vista's various restrictions - especially when installing programs. You should include an installer for your add-in - it is generally considered a good idea for your customers, and has been recommended by Microsoft for quite a while now.

I also recommend you check the Microsoft website for recommendations and best practices for developing with Windows Vista - I think you might also be surprised by a few other things that you should be doing.


Richard

Did you try registering the dll with regsvr32

Thanks Richard and John, from your posts I was able to piece this together --
COM Add-in is "not a valid Office add-in." under Windows 7 64-bit