Get InfoPath to Preview VSTO and VSTA Projects

Written by Gregory Scot Collins

Friday, 29 February 2008, 5:08 AM

My wife at one point suggested that, since no one else was experiencing the issue, maybe one of my MSDN discs was faulty. It made sense to me as a possibility as I had been having some problems with the Visual Studio disc. Downloading the discs was not an option because I didn't have a fast enough Internet connection. So, after much prodding from her, I finally called MSDN and they sent out a new set of discs. What was supposed to be an overnight delivery ended up taking a week because someone in shipping sent it standard mail—ugh! But, sadly the new discs made no difference, and I was able to drop it as a possibility.

The second miracle fix occurred as I prepared to make a business trip. My aging laptop had two issues: it could not preview InfoPath managed code projects, and more importantly it had a dead battery (meaning it needed to always be plugged in). So it was time to upgrade. After the new laptop arrived, I only had a few days to get it built out for the trip. I reformatted it and installed Windows Vista Ultimate (32-bit), Office Ultimate 2007, Visual Studio 2005 Professional + SP1 + Vista Patch, Visual Studio 2005 Team Explorer, and VSTO SE. To my horror, the issue persisted on this new machine.

By this time, I am at my wits end on this. I could be found kicking and screaming. Oh, if you only knew how much turmoil this issue caused me!

On multiple occasions I had scoured the Internet in search of anyone else reporting the same issue, but none could be found. I had talked with several members of the Microsoft InfoPath team, but no one had ever heard of the issue. I had worked with Microsoft Tier 1 and Tier 2 support, but they were unable to help. It seemed as though I was to remain alone in my pain, that no one else in the entire world was experiencing this issue (as unlikely as that seemed), while I encountered it on every machine I ever touched, including multiple desktop and laptop computers of different makes and models installed with various versions of Windows including XP (32-bit) and Vista (32-bit and 64-bit).

After much frustration and some praying for help, I finished building out my machine so that I could at least still use it on my trip. While I wouldn't be able to preview, I could always publish the form and open it from the published location (refer to Solution 1: The workaround). At least that worked. So, accordingly I installed Internet Information Services (IIS) (a prerequisite for SQL), and then installed SQL Server 2005 Enterprise + SP2. Then, suddenly preview started working! It makes no sense to me now why that would have made any difference, but again God smiled on me and it started working. I've since installed other machines in the same manner and have not had that same success. I really don't know why it worked, but it did, and I thanked my Maker for it.

Once I got it working, I created a restore point, and then started installing updates. But, after all of the updates finished installing, preview stopped working again. Aha! This has happened to me twice now. One of these updates was causing the issue to rear its ugly head. I performed a system restore, verified everything was working, then laboriously, started installing the updates a few at a time. At length, I tracked the breaking update to KB937143: Cumulative Security Update for Internet Explorer. This update alone affected my ability to preview an InfoPath managed code project. And uninstalling it did not fix the problem, so I resorted to another system restore.

Having already disabled Windows Update on this machine, I left it at that and emailed my experience to my friends at Microsoft. We discussed various ideas and thoughts. They had me try a VSTA form instead of VSTO; same issue. Script or no code, on the other hand, previewed just fine. I tried a full Office Repair—no difference. They told me: "Launching the preview mode, all we do is check whether the parent process is a safe one. We do this by looking at a few registry values." And again: "Currently we are thinking it might be some registry values being corrupted or change of IE settings after the installation." They asked if they could take a look at my machine, and as I was going to be in the Redmond area on my business trip, I arranged a time to meet with them. At the appointed time, they dug through my laptop registry and tried a few things, but were ultimately unsuccessful in their attempts. I left the exact steps I had taken to build out my machine (what worked, what didn't work), including the specific update that caused the issue with one of their testers to try to reproduce the issue. But all such attempts were fruitless. Again, I was left a lone man in the wilderness of no preview.