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I've written a custom ribbon for word. In my winForms-application I also open a word document with word-Interop to create some texts with word.

When I use normal word documents my ribbon is shown correct but when I open the document in my application then the ribbon is gone.

I found out that it is somehow disabled in the COM-AddIn-Options in Word. When I reactivate it manually it appears.

How can I reactivate it programmatically?

[Update] For better understanding: I have two solutions. 1) A AddIn for Word which displays a ribbon 2) A winform-application which has a winword-control which loads word in it.

When the second one is started the first one is not available anymore.

Dirk Vollmar
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Steffen Schindler
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    COM addins are disabled automatically when they have crashed Word. It happens a lot while debugging your addin. – sashoalm Mar 01 '13 at 14:15
  • Is there any log where I can see if it crashes? – Steffen Schindler Mar 01 '13 at 14:20
  • Not that I know of. But if you've terminated Word while debugging your COM addin, Word thinks your COM addin crashed it, so it disables it. So don't worry about it. If your addin has been disabled, it means it's crashing Word. So don't try to re-enable it programatically, cause you will piss your users off by crashing Word constantly on their computers. – sashoalm Mar 01 '13 at 14:22
  • No, I'm not debugging it. When I'm reactivate it in my winform-Window it works fine. Something must be deactivating it. – Steffen Schindler Mar 01 '13 at 14:25
  • You need to first have a very good idea why it's getting deactivated. – sashoalm Mar 01 '13 at 14:30

1 Answers1

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To answer your question, it's not possible to programatically re-enable your add-in from the add-in itself. Think about it - it doesn't get loaded, so its code won't get run. So nothing you put in your code will re-enable the addin, because it won't get executed.

The only way would be to create a watchdog process that checks if the COM add-in has been disabled every 10 minutes or so, and re-enables it. You'll need to know where Word stores those settings though.

sashoalm
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  • Is it maybe possible to reenable it from the interop-call where I open the wordcontrol in my winform-application? – Steffen Schindler Mar 01 '13 at 14:40
  • Ah, you have a program that loads Word and you also have your own addin which Word loads? In that case, it might be possible. I'll edit my question when I have time. – sashoalm Mar 01 '13 at 14:42
  • See if your `Application` object has a `GetAddIns()` method. Get that object, it should have an `Add()` method. – sashoalm Mar 01 '13 at 14:50