Tablet PC: How to redistribute the COM InkAnalysis API with your application

Yesterday, I posted about how to redistribute the Winforms InkAnalysis API with your application. Today we’ll take a quick look at redistributing the COM InkAnalysis API with your application. With Windows Forms, we had two options: The first being to have the setup and deployment project detect the dependencies, and to correspondingly have it include and install the managed InkAnalysis assemblies to your application’s install directory. The second option was to add the appropriate InkAnalysis merge modules (MSM files) to your setup and deployment project directly. This causes them to be installed by the MSI installer when your application gets installed.

With COM InkAnalysis, we want to stick with adding the merge modules to your setup and deployment project since COM InkAnalysis installs the InkAnalysis COM object- IACom.dll. The COM object should not be installed locally in the project’s directory (would require that it be regsvr32’d). Do do this, Right click your setup project in the solution explorer, and select “AddàMerge Module”. Then browse to %ProgramFiles%\Microsoft Tablet PC Platform SDK\msm and add “IACore.msm” and “IACom.msm”. Now you will install the merge modules on the system in a manner in which they can be upgraded, etc.

That’s it!