I have a Windows XP, Word 2007 PC.  On it I have installed Visual Studio.Net, WinFX CTP (Feb.), VSTO, followed by VSTO CTP.

I actually had this setup working a while back (in May), and at the time created a few VSTO Word add-ins that ran perfectly in Word 2007. But now I cannot run any of the add-ins I created previously on this PC.

When I open one of the .sln files, I get this VS error:  "The type initializer for Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Hosting.VCG threw an exception."

The project does open, but it contains a warning: "Warning: The generated files could not be loaded and have been recreated."

(And there was at one time a project warning regarding WindowsBase.dll but it went away.)

I can build the project with no errors, but when I try to Debug and it runs Word 2007, it is not stopping at my breakpoint for ThisApplication_Startup. And Word starts but it shows an error captioned Office Document Customization is Not Available, with detail:
Could not load file or assembly 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Contract, Version=2.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b03f5f7f11d50a3a' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.

Since getting these errors, I uninstalled Windows Foundation (it made me to this in oder to reinstall WinFX), reinstalled WinFX CTP Feb., repaired VSTO Runtime, uninstalled/reinstalled VSTO entirely, and finally reinstalled the VSTO CTP v3.  And I'm back to the same errors.

Please help!

Thanks

Karen

Can you create, run and debug new add-ins?

Thanks, Richard.

Hi,

any news on this one? I deinstalled VSTO CTP v3 with all the sample addins available for that release.

I installed VSTO 2005 SE and now I get the same error message:

"The type initializer for 'Microsoft.VisualStudio.Tools.Applications.Hosting.VCG' threw an exception"

I repaired the original VSTO package from VS2005 and VSTO 2005 SE but the error is the same.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

--
SvenC

I will attempt to reproduce this failure.

I didn't receive any response to my initial question regarding creating and running new customizations. Perhaps you might be able to answer instead.

Thanks, Richard.

Unfortunately, we don't support any scenarios involving the VSTO CTP release. When installing VSTO 2005 SE this must be done on a clean machine that has not had the CTP release installed on it previously. In order to do this, you will need to reimage your machine. Sorry for the inconvenience that this may cause you.

If you still experience this issue with a clean VSTO 2005 SE install, please let me know immediately and I will investigate further.

Best regards, Richard.

Thank you for your suggestions. Everything is working for the most part now that I have VSTO SE installed on my Word 2007 PC. However, while I can create Word 2007 Add-ins, I see no way to create Word 2007 document and template projects (it still wants to use Word 2003 for these, but Word 2003 is no longer on my machine). I have posted a new thread about this since it is a different topic.

Karen