How can I fix an PowerPoint VSTO that needs to Read from MS Project and the Version of MS Project Installed is different than the rest of Office?

Question

I develop a commercially sold PowerPoint VSTO add-in that reads data from open Microsoft Project files. It takes what the user has currently selected in MS Project and creates a PowerPoint chart of it. The PowerPoint Add-in references the Microsoft.Office.Interop.MSProject library to connect with MS Project.

I have a user who has MS Office 365 installed for the "normal" office suite (Excel, PowerPoint, Word, Outlook) but uses MS Project 2013. Because of this, the PowerPoint add-in is not able to read data from the user's Active MS Project file.

The Add-in works fine when the versions of MS Project and the rest of Office are the same, but seems to lose its interoperability when the installed version of MS Project is lower than the installed version of PowerPoint.

Is there a solution to be able to get these mixed versions of Office to communicate with each other? looking for something other than telling the user "You need to upgrade MS Project to be on the same version as the rest of Office"

Perhaps using a NuGet Package such as NetOffice would resolve this?

Answer 1

I was able to resolve this issue by using the NetOffice to replace the Microsoft Project Interop dependencies. Super easy switch!