Why doesn't the office PIA install correctly to the GAC?

Question

I am currently working on a c# project, where I need to access Outlook. The development is being done on two different machines, one of which has office installed, and one o

Answer 1

I hit this a while ago, with a similar project. The PIA redistributable will only install the PIAs if Office is already installed on the machine (which kind of makes sense, but can be annoying when it comes to deployment)

Visual Studio should install the Office PIAs into a folder under it's own install directory - for example, on my machine I have a copy of all the PIAs under:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 10.0\Visual Studio Tools for Office\PIA\Office14

It's possible that these only get installed if you have Office on your machine at the time VS is installed, or perhaps there is an install option in the VS installer to install VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office).

If your problem is just related to getting a build working on the development machine that doesn't have Office, then you could try re-running the VS installer and see if you get an option to install VSTO, or try a google search and see if there is a separate VSTO download

Otherwise, I would just copy the PIAs from this folder to a similar location on the other Dev box.