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Participant
May 25, 2010
Question

COM Reference in CS5 Missing

  • May 25, 2010
  • 6 replies
  • 27475 views

Does any body know what happened to the COM reference in visual studio 2008 for photoshop CS5, i just installed and my CS4 COM vanished and now there is no COM reference for photoshop CS5.

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6 replies

August 25, 2010

Thanks for looking into this further!

I've tried running a few of the VB scripts, and then looking for the COM references again, but no luck I'm afraid.

Some details on what I'm running, and have installed, etc:

Vista 32 (UAC enabled)

Photoshop CS4 Extended and CS5 Extended installed.

MS Visual C# 2010 and 2008 installed.

Cheers,

Geoff Lester

SG...
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
August 25, 2010

Hi William & Geoff,

Can you try turning UAC off, and see if that makes a difference?

thx,

steve

Inspiring
August 25, 2010

Turning off UAC on the Windows 7 laptop (then restarting Windows 7) and then running the OpenDocument.vbs script in my Photoshop CS5 Sample Scripts folder had the desired result. Now when I open a project in Visual Studio 2010 and look and the available COM references, the Adobe Photoshop CS5 object Library and CS5 Type Library are now available.

I should note that after clicking on the OpenDocument.vbs and Photoshop opened, it took a very long time before the test document actually opened, which was not the case when I had earlier tried it with UAC on. However, it turned out that another program was doing an update in the background, so this may have been what slowed things down and had nothing to do with whatever Photoshop may have been doing.

I also wonder why, since I received no message about changes when I had the UAC turned on, it would it have prevented the COM components being created.

Anyway, you have apparently discovered a way to have the COM Interop dlls generated.

Participant
August 23, 2010

Sorry, I didnt post what i found, i did get contacted by a support tech from adobe but he gave me no information, just asked for what i had found. but anyway it looks like its all in the installer i have several different version cs4 design premium, cs5 design premium, cs4 master, cs5 master,cs5 web and they all seem to do a little differently my cs4 master collection does install all COM references cs5 design does not install all only illustrator COM. thats all i got so maybe pickup a different install and see if it works the compiled installs may be different i dont know its all so stressful, i will now have a bubble bath and then reclaim my manhood by eating pounds of MEAT.

SG...
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
August 24, 2010

Hi,

Can you try running one of the sample VB scripts from the Scripting directory: c:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5\Scripting\Sample Scripts\VBScript\

See if that corrects the bad path in a registry key.

thx,

steve

Inspiring
August 24, 2010

I ran the OpenDocument.vbs, and it opened the document in the LayerComps.psd document. But what does this prove?

August 23, 2010

Was wondering if anyone found any other way to get around this issue?

I didn't have any luck using previous built versions of the dll, my application just hangs when I try to create a COM photoshop instance.

If Adobe has replied that they don't intend to allow COM interop anymore, I'd like to know, because it is a fairly important part of our toolchain, and it will be quite some work to find an alternative solution, and it has really been a god send for automation.

I'd be happy to register the components myself, etc, if someone has found a way to do so!

Participant
May 27, 2010

Ok after i couple of Days of reading your Replys and Testing some of the COMs from CS4 it looks as though they have not changed much i am acutally using a CS4 COM on Indesign CS5 so a quick remedy to this problem is to go get any of the last version "interop.*adobe_app*.dll" and save those away and load them in, i am seeing that they are still working. but like my self i am sure you all want to be using the latest COMs and would like to see the reference in Visual Studio (i know it would make me feel better).

Inspiring
May 27, 2010

I don't understand your suggestion. 

On my XP computer where I have COM references for Photoshop CS4 and CS5 and everything is working fine in automating Photoshop via Visual Studio.  However, there are no interop files associated with Adobe that I can find on the computer via a search.

On my Windows 7 64-bit computer, were I cannot set any reference to an Adobe COM component for Photoshop CS4 or CS5, there is only one such interop file, and it is interop.AdobdPDFMakerX.dll

On the Windows 7 computer, as COM components, from Visual Studio I do have listed Adobe Illustrator CS4 & CS5 Type Libraries along with an Adobe InDesign CS4 Type Library but no InDesign CS5 library.  And nothing for Photoshop.

So there seems to be something different about the installation on Win 7 64-bit and Win XP. It would be interesting to know what others having these problems are using for operating systems.

An interesting point is that if I write a Photoshop automation Windows Forms program on the XP computer using Visual studio, then I can simply take the executable and run it on the Win 7 64-bit computer with no problem.

Message was edited by: William LaMartin

Participant
May 27, 2010

In your project folder (your photoshop automation project) under bin\debug or obj\debug there should be an interop.photoshop.dll file. But as you can see I said should, which probably needs to be changed to "could", because at this point in time im not sure of anything except that Im probably wrong. But hey give it shot it might be there, that is were I found mine.

Tom Ruark
Inspiring
May 25, 2010

You should not need to reinstall to get the typelibraries going. Are you using the Object Library or the TypeLibrary for CS4 and CS

5? I found this web site that tells you to register a typelibrary this way:

Type Libraries
Type libraries are binary files that contain all type information needed to utilize procedures and classes in a DLL. To register a type library, you can use regtlib.exe as follows:

  1. Select Start » Run.

  2. Type the following in the dialog box that appears:
    C:\WINDOWS\system32\URTTemp\regtlib.exe  <Full path of .tlb file>
    Where <Full path of .tlb file> is the location of your type library file.

In Visual Studio, I could select the browse button and load up my CS4 type library. I had the CS5 Object Library (ScriptingSupport) and the CS5 TypeLibrary (TypeLibrary.tlb) listed in my COM listing. I just clicked the Browse tab and loaded it that way for CS4.

Paul Riggott
Inspiring
May 26, 2010

Thanks for that Tom, but I use the Object library and have searched the Net but haven't found any information on what the file is called, where it is located or how to install it. I do know there are a multitude of registry entries required though. It would be fantastic if there was a way of adding/removing the required Com as you need to run each version of Photoshop on a seperate machine or in a VM to be able to work with the different Photoshop versions.

Tom Ruark
Inspiring
May 26, 2010

H:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Photoshop CS5 (64 Bit)\Plug-ins\Extensions\ScriptingSupport.8li it is a dll and hopefully the program will let it go with an 8li extension instead of dll.

Paul Riggott
Inspiring
May 25, 2010

I have filed a bug report about this, but no fix as yet.

Participant
May 25, 2010

so i am guessing i should file a bug report as well so i can be on the response list and move back to CS4

Paul Riggott
Inspiring
May 25, 2010

That would be a good idea, you will need to uninstall CS5 and CS4 then re-install CS4 to get the COM back, bit of PITA.