Get InfoPath to Preview VSTO and VSTA Projects

Written by Gregory Scot Collins

Friday, 29 February 2008, 5:08 AM

If you were only interested in how to fix the issue, then you can stop reading now. What follows is a detailed history of what I went through to find the solution to this issue which plagued me for more than a full year.

I had been developing InfoPath 2003 managed code projects in Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005 without issue. Because most of my development work targeted InfoPath 2003, I delayed upgrading to Office 2007 until it became absolutely necessary to continue working. First, I attempted a side-by-side install of Office 2003 and Office 2007 which, while allowed, had some known issues for InfoPath development. As a result, I completely removed everything to do with the 2003 products. It was here I began receiving the not-so-helpful "InfoPath cannot open the selected form" error message. No one I talked to had any idea why this was occurring.

Being an InfoPath developer by trade, I had to get back up and running. This meant reverting to my previous configuration, which was a struggle in-and-of itself. I even reformatted my laptop and built it out clean with just the latest products only to have the same issue. Through these struggles, I eventually tracked down VSTO as one culprit. With InfoPath 2003 I used the Office InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005, a different beast than Visual Studio Tools for the Microsoft Office System. When I installed VSTO SE, which is required to work with InfoPath 2007, I started to encounter the issue. Eventually I was back up and running with the following configuration: Office 2007 (minus InfoPath 2007), InfoPath 2003, Visual Studio 2005, and Office InfoPath 2003 Toolkit for Visual Studio 2005.

After much emailing it was made evident that if you wanted to develop in both versions of InfoPath that Microsoft recommended building out two machines: one for InfoPath 2003 development and one for InfoPath 2007 development.

A friend on the Microsoft InfoPath team was not experiencing this issue while using the following configuration: Office 2007, Visual Studio 2005, and VSTO SE. However, I had already tried this and it didn't work for me. He, therefore, recommended that I contact Microsoft Support to see if they can track down the issue. After going through their Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, it became obvious that no one had any idea what was going on; nor, for that matter, had anyone even heard of this issue. I was apparently the first and only person in the world to experience this. Yet, my experience was consistent.

Lost are my emails that describe my elation as I eventually got preview working on a new desktop machine I bought due to the ailing performance of my older system. But, somehow or another I actually got it working. Knowing all I now know about the root cause of this issue, I am amazed that I ever did get it working. Certainly God was watching out for me and His blessing upon me! This was my first miracle in regards to this issue. A second occurred later with a new laptop.

I was able to continue working for a very long time like this: being able to preview on my desktop machine but not on my laptop. At one point, I ran Windows Update on my desktop (I had it set to check for updates but not download or install them unless I said to), after which I started having the same issue: no longer preview my InfoPath managed code projects.

Oh the trauma! This painfully knocked me out of work for a day or two as I tried everything I could think of to fix it. I uninstalled every update that was recently added to my machine, but to no avail. I could not revert to a working state. More emailing. One of my coworkers mentioned System Restore (a wonderful, wonderful Windows feature) which got me back into a working state. Upon recommendation, I set Windows Update to never check for updates to prevent this nightmare from occurring again. And there my machine remained, lacking any updates, until the recent discovery of the solution.