Getting help on VSTO topics

This post is prompted by a comment left yesterday on my blog. The comment was quite big in size. It went something like this - "my assembly has an ActionsPane and can not be loaded, here is the error message I am getting .... ". This brief introduction was followed by 300 lines of the VSTO error message including the stack at the point of failure + all the assemblies that are loaded in the AppDomain". I removed the comment.

I like to help out, I really do. And the purpose of this blog is to provide information to help our users troubleshoot some of the issues. I do accept requests to talk about mechanics or details of a particular feature. However, if you are stuck please count on the community to get help. I do not really scale very well and can not do much all by myself.

The preferable way to post your VSTO questions and help requests is to use VSTO forums. IMHO the forums format is way better than the newsgroups format. The main feature there is that a thread can be marked as resolved. This allows us to better manage our resources on open issues and not look through questions that have been already answered.

I should say that before the forums were launched I used to answer question on Google Groups. But as soon as I learned about the forums format my monitoring of the newsgroups came to almost complete halt.

Last, but not least. I would like to call upon people to read our forums and answer the questions. As a prize for the contributions you will learn a lot about the technology and might become Microsoft MVP (those MVPs have access to many more resources than mere mortals).