How to merge or package assemblies for Office Add-ins

[Bruce]

I've taken over the development of an Office Add-in that uses WPF for Custom Task Panes. I implementedTelerik RadPanelBar and RTFviewer to support some new features.

For design and development in Visual Studio I added the assemblies to the GAC and referenced them from the Add-in project. The solution runs on the dev machine but after build and deployment (through .msi) the Task Pane won't open because the Telerik dlls are not available.

I saw this blog post about merging assemblies in WPF but I can't use this solution because it slows down and crashes the Office application if I try to run this assembly resolver at startup.

How can I merge the referenced Telerik assemblies into the add-in dll or at least copy and deploy as part of the add-in installation?

Thanks

[Petya]

Hi Bruce,

We've encountered similar issues before and at that time this seemed to be related to the fact that the Telerik assemblies were loaded by a class library registered for COM interop which caused a permission issue of some sort. We haven't been able to isolate this on our end in order to troubleshoot it and try to come up with a solution. So far, the only workaround we've found is to explicitly load all assemblies, i.e.

Assembly.Load("Telerik.Windows.Controls");

If possible, please send us a simple sample that reproduces the problem, so we can further look into its cause.

Regards,
Petya
Telerik