Use dll files on users PC's

Question

I've written a program that uses the Word and Excel COM components. All the users have Word and Excel installed on their PC's. Is there a way to distribute only the .exe file to users without the Interop.Word.dll and Interop.Excel.dll files i.e. make it use the files on the users PC's? Any help would be much appreciated!

korie · Answer

Thanks for the reply! What I actually wanted to do is e-mail the .exe file to users without the need of a setup program because it's not an actual application but a formless program that will just change a couple of word and excel settings. So I thought it would be better to e-mail just the one file instead of all the reference files as well. If there's no other way I might just have to look at changing the registry directly without the Word and Excel objects. Thanks Korie.

madinewala · Answer

Hi One thing to understand is the COM DLLs of Word/Excel on the client PCs are unmanaged while the Interop.Word.dll and Interop.Excel.dll files are managed ones and the .NET app uses these managed ones. you could do is instead of distributing the Interops within the setup have the code that creates these interops on the client PCs. This way you could use the created Interops and avoid distribution of the interops. Furthermore you could create the interops for these COM dlls using tlbimp.exe utility HTH irfan