Outlook vs. Whidbey

Ok, so I have been wrestling for the last few days with the fact that I was unable to debug .NET addins in Outlook. For whatever reason, Visual Studio would launch Outlook, and then it would crash almost immediately. I started to think that this might be a permissions issue. With that in mind, I broke out FileMon and RegMon from SysInternals.

RegMon turned up nothing, but FileMon did the trick. Just before Outlook crashed, it loaded v2.0.40301 (Whidbey) libraries, and what looked as if maybe even the Whidbey CLR. Anyhow, what I did was add an OUTLOOK.EXE.config file (yes, you can do that), with the following:

<configuration>
   <startup>
      <supportedRuntime version=”v1.1.4322″/>
      <supportedRuntime version=”v1.0.3705″/>
   </startup>
</configuration>

Well, sure as the sun rises in the East, it worked. By the way, the reason why I knew that this could be done was because I saw the runtime in FileMon look for this file, so I new the usual rules for config files applied even when the CLR is hosted in a non-managed application such as Outlook.

Oh the other thing that is the real problem is that I uninstalled the Whidbey preview, but it appears as if most, if not all, of the version 2 framework components are still there, and active none the less. I attempted to search Google for some idea on how to rid my system of verson 2, but to no avail. Anyway, as soon as XP SP2 goes RTM, I’m going to reinstall XP fresh.