Installing a Visual Studio 2005 Add-in for all users

For posterity, here is a nugget of information that required quite a bit of digging to uncover.

If you want to install a Visual Studio 2005 Add-in for all users, drop the .AddIn and .DLL files (along with any subdirectory containing satellite DLL(s)) in the following directory:

C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\Microsoft\MSEnvShared\AddIns

If %ALLUSERSPROFILE% is not C:\Documents and Settings\All Users on your machine, adjust accordingly.

Microsoft's documentation on installing a Visual Studio 2005 add-in is fairly confusing, although I do see now that they mention this directory in a comment below the main article.

This issue came up as part of deploying a Visual Studio Add-in for Marmoset which a YCP student and I wrote this summer. Marmoset is a nifty project submission and testing server for programming courses. I expect the Add-in will be a part of the forthcoming open source release of Marmoset, which should happen sometime this Fall.