Wanted to let fellow developers know about some issue I've encountered. By now, most of us know about the potential issues related to using VS2005SP1 to compile CS3 plug-ins.
I've now encountered a different, probably similar issue.
What happened was that some people complained that some of my recently compiled InDesign CS3 and CS4 Windows plug-ins refused to load on their copy of InDesign. They would load fine on my end.
I managed to duplicate the issue by installing some brand new virtual machines. Neither CS3, nor CS4 plugins compiled from my 'main' PC would run in these 'pristine' virtual machines.
By uninstalling VS2005 on my main PC, and reinstalling from scratch, then upgrading to VS2005SP1 things became 'normal' again - plugins would run fine (the recipients might need to install a VS2005SP1 VC++ redistributable in order to run CS3 plug-ins compiled with VS2005SP1 instead of VS2005, but apart from that things worked OK).
I was suspicious that Microsoft update might have 'broken' my Visual Studio 2005 - and today I got proof: Windows Update proudly announced it had a bunch of security updates for VS2005SP1, plus an update for ATL (whatever that is).
Before letting it do its thing, I took a snapshot of my main machine, and then let Microsoft Update loose.
Result: if I now recompile my plug-ins they are again 'broken' - they don't want to run on my 'pristine' set-ups.
I have not figured out which of the updates is the culprit - there were a few of them. Also, I have searched the MSDN web site for an update to the VS2005SP1 redistributable (I'd expect such a beast to exist) - but I had no success.
So, a word of warning: you might want to refrain from installing the recent VS2005SP1 updates, or risk creating useless CS3 and CS4 plugins.
Anyone else bump into the same issue?
Cheers,
Kris