Activator.CreateInstance() works inside VSIDE but not externally

Question

I have a bunch of COM objects which all implement the same interface, and need to create one of them as chosen at runtime from a list of options. Since I know the CLSID for

Answer 1

Not sure what is happening there but as a workaround I wonder if you might try launching the process with something like...

System.Diagnostics.Process.Start("THE_PROCESS.exe");

Then once the process is running you could try to get the object from the running objects table using the ProgID...

object appObj = System.Runtime.InteropServices.Marshal.GetActiveObject("THE_PROGID");