I have created a new project and im trying to follow Ted Pattison's "Office Developer Screencast" for creating your own ribbon. Im upto the stage of running the setup program and checking to see if the new ribbon loads but it lists the COM add-in under the Inactive section and when you try to add the DLL manually it says "this is no a valid office addin". Any ideas? I have a fresh install of XP with Visual Studio 2005, Office Beta 2 with Technical Refresh. I haven't installed the latest SDK or Office Beta Tools as i don't think at this stage i need them.

namespace TestMacros

using System;

using Extensibility;

using System.Runtime.InteropServices;

using Microsoft.Office.Core;

using System.Reflection;

using System.IO;

[GuidAttribute("1E5B1562-A0EF-47B9-9AE5-D3D575A3E82A"), ProgId("DPPMacros.Connect")]

public class Connect : Object, Extensibility.IDTExtensibility2, IRibbonExtensibility

public Connect()

public void OnConnection(object application, Extensibility.ext_ConnectMode connectMode, object addInInst, ref System.Array custom)

public void OnDisconnection(Extensibility.ext_DisconnectMode disconnectMode, ref System.Array custom)

public void OnAddInsUpdate(ref System.Array custom)

public void OnStartupComplete(ref System.Array custom)

public void OnBeginShutdown(ref System.Array custom)

private object applicationObject;

private object addInInstance;

#region IRibbonExtensibility Members

public string GetCustomUI(string RibbonID)

Assembly asm = Assembly.GetExecutingAssembly();

Stream stream = asm.GetManifestResourceStream("TestMacros.Resources.TestMacros.xml");

StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream);

string ribbon = reader.ReadToEnd();

return ribbon;