The Office Routing Plus add-in now supports the 64 bit version of Office 2010. Office 2010 is the very first version of Microsoft Office, which runs in 64 bit mode on 64 bit machines. Read more about the 64 bit version of Office here.
If your company needs to install the Office Routing Plus add-in on 64 bit versions of Office, request the special 64 bit installer. Note that a 64 bit Operating System running a 32 bit version of Office 2010 does NOT need the 64 bit installer; in this case you may use the standard 32 bit installer. Bitness in the case of Office Routing Plus is defined by the bitness of Office 2010 and not the OS.
To get the add-in to run in 64 bit versions of Office involved a good deal of trial and error. Many thanks to Wade Roesner of Bedford Industries (a current client of Office Routing Plus) for assisting a good deal in troubleshooting on some 64 bit Office machines in their environment. After working with Wade, his final comment was “Thank you for developing this tool and your excellent support of it.” Many thanks to you for diligently testing and for your patience as well.
If any tech geeks are wondering what the fix was, read on below.
Our first attempt to get this working was to recompile the ORP .NET assembly itself and target for 64 bit machines. After reading a few blogs on this subject, we realized that this was not necessary for an Office 64 bit version that needs to run an Office Shared Com Add-In; the default target of “Any CPU” was sufficient. But what was happening was the add-in would register to the wow6432Node in the registry on a 64 bit OS. This was a problem because 64 bit versions of Office cannot see add-ins in the wow6432Node as this article describes. And, we still needed to find a way to mark the assembly itself as a 64 bit assembly, but apparently not through Visual Studio itself as noted above. The final fix came from the Advanced Installer support team. They advised that we mark all components that get registered upon install as 64 bit components inside of the Advanced Installer setup file and that we also mark the installation type property in the Advanced Installer setup project as 64 bit. Everything worked after this–the add-in registered to the proper location (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Office\Excel\AddIns\RoutingSolution_sharedComAddIn.Connect) and the add-in responds within Word/Excel 2010.