I need/want to avoid the whole archaic separate installation process to use bartender automation in our application. Given that Bartender is still kind of stuck in the past and only provides wrappers for the COM controls we have the registration issue.

Now, there IS a way to use COM components in .NET using registration free activation - see:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms973913.aspx

So the issue now becomes, can anybody tell me what exactly the dependency tree looks like for bartender? Out of all of the junk that gets installed with bartender, which dlls/executables/configuration files are needed at minimum for deployment to work? Also, how does the license activation come into play for this situation given the goal is to have bartender installed in each workstation. I understand the licensing needs to account for this arrangement but we need to be able to just have bartender install and "just work" along with everything else since it is a ClickOnce deployment. We just cannot afford to muddy the whole deployment process with any separate manual steps of installing bartender or activating it.

Thanks!


Actually another issue is that it seems that bartend.exe cannot be used regfree by setting isolation=true in .NET for the reference. It seems the classes in question need to be marked as multiuse and we have PublicNotCreatible in bartend.exe... so I'm stuck even on this front. It would do this product a world of good to provide a streamlined deployment method for .NET.


Error 3 Problem isolating COM reference 'BarTender': Registry key 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{8786aea4-17ec-11d1-8ad8-006097d76312}\InProcServer32' is missing value '(Default)'. LabelPrint


Error 6 Problem isolating COM reference 'BarTender': Registry key 'HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{b9425246-4131-11d2-be48-004005a04edf}\InProcServer32' is missing value '(Default)'. LabelPrint


Error 7 Problem isolating COM reference 'BarTender': No registered classes were detected for this component. LabelPrint