Programatically determine if Shared Features installed for VBA

Question

Sometimes users/customers report my Visio application fails with error 438. This usually is the result of a Visio installation where the Office Shared Features do not have VBA enabled/installed.
Is there a way my application installer/setup can determine this?

Answer 1

You can check if corresponding feature is installed for the Visio product (it's called "VBAFiles"). The details depend on the technology you use. Windows Installer has an
API function (there is also
unmanaged version) to determine if a given feature of a given product is installed or not. Note that since there can be many ProductCodes for Visio (depending on edition, language, service
pack, etc), you may need to check them all. For example, Visio 2013 can have ProductCode = "{90150000-0051-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}". Given this code, you simple check is like this:
installer.FeatureState ("{90150000-0051-0000-0000-0000000FF1CE}", "VBAFiles") = 3
But some numbers in actual ProductCode the user has may be different. Basically, the "stable" parts are:
XXXXXXXX-005Z-XXXX-XXXX-0000000FF1CE
Instead of X you may have more or less anything. Instead of "00ZZ" you may have only a fixed list (see below). The tail is always fixed. The whole list of Visio product codes can be found in this KB article:
KB2786054: Description of the numbering scheme for product code GUIDs in Office
This code snippet (C#) which just iterates over possible combinations for Visio 2007, 2010, 2013:
var installerType = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("WindowsInstaller.Installer");
dynamic installer = Activator.CreateInstance(installerType);
// iterate over all installed products
foreach (var productCode in installer.Products)
// Visio "short-codes" see https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/kb/2786054
var visioCodes = new [] {"0051", "0052", "0053", "0057" };
// if our product code is Visio product code
if (visioCodes.Any(visioCode => Regex.IsMatch(productCode,
string.Format(@"^{{........-{0}-....-....-0000000FF1CE}}$", visioCode))))
// check if VBA is isntalled
var vbaInstalled = installer.FeatureState(productCode, "VBAFiles") == 3;
Another pair of gotchas: user may have more than one Visio installed, and some of them may have VBA installed and some not. Also, this won't work for Visio for office 365, since it's not installed with MSI but streaming. But since you can't really change
anything in Visio 365 install anyways, it doesn't seem to matter.
Not sure if messing with this worth it though :)
-- Nikolay Belyh, http://unmanagedvisio.com