Hi vincent,

PIA means Primary Interop Assembly which is used to help the solution developer to leverage all the new capabilities of the Microsoft .NET Framework
and to access Microsoft Office in a reliable and consistent way. The office object model from PIA is compatible within 10 and 11.

From my experience on this issue, please remember to deploy the app-related PIA version to the users' boxes. Therefore, if you develop one solution
with the office xp PIA, your application will call the office xp PIA assembly from GAC. The version of Office XP PIA is 10.0.4504.0. During runtime, the
application will try to find this version of PIA assembly from GAC and then load it. If it is not able to find it, it will report the FileNotFoundException
exception. Also then, if you develop the app with office 11, your application will need the 11 version of PIA to run. When you deploy the application
to users, you should firstly check the PIA version in the GAC so that you can deploy the app-related PIA to the destination. This is because CLR will
check the version of referenced assembly.

In another way, if you develop the solution with office XP, you can recompile it in the office 11 located box and will only need to change the PIA
reference to a newer version. In this way, your application can run with office 11 PIA without modifying the codes.

For more information on this Office XP PIA issue, I'd suggest two msdn articles that may help. Please go to:
A Primer to the Office XP Primary Interop Assemblies
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en...asp?frame=true

Primary Interop Assemblies (PIAs)
http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en...asp?frame=true

Please feel free to let me know if you have any further questions.

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Wei-Dong Xu
Microsoft Product Support Services
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