Testing Your Smart Tags

Sometimes, when you attempt to test your smart tag, you'll find that it doesn't seem to work. If you check your code over and over and can't find anything wrong with it, other settings in the system might be affecting your smart tag. The following are some troubleshooting actions you can take:

• Check the macro settings in the host application. If they are set too restrictively, such as with the High setting, your smart tag will be disabled.

• Close and restart the host applications after compiling. Changes in your smart tag are not picked up by the applications until all instances of Word, Excel, and Outlook are closed and restarted.

• If your smart tag crashes, Office will disable it. Check in the registry under the registration for your recognizer. If you see a Status subkey with a value of 1, your DLL crashed and has been disabled. If you see a value of 8, your DLL was disabled in Word. If you see a value of 16, your DLL was disabled in Excel. Delete the Status subkey and try again. If you see a value of 24 (8+16), the smart tag is disabled in both Word and Excel. For more values for this key, see the smart tag SDK.

• Your CLSID might have changed. If you registered your smart tag using ProgIDs, you do not have to worry about this. Be sure you are using Project Compatibility in Visual Basic when you create your DLLs.

• Your DLL might not be registered properly. Run Regsvr32 on your DLL file.

If none of these steps works, as a last resort you might have to unregister all your smart tags, unregister your DLLs, recompile your code to recreate the DLLs, and try again.