Regasm is not working / ActiveX component can't create object

Question

I wrote a C# .dll in Visual Studio which I want to call from excel VBA. (I used this tutorial)

On my Development PC where I set the settings in the Project properties for "Make COM-Visible", "Register for COM interop" and "sign the assembly" it all works fine. The dll is getting registered automatically by Visual Studio and I can select and set it in Excel in VBA Window > Tools > References

The use case now is that I can use that dll file on another PC which does not have Visual Studio installed.

As told in the tutorial and all around the internet the way to go is by using the command line tool RegAsm.exe, what I did (if its useful: I used the one in the following folder: C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\RegAsm.exe)

The command to register the dll is:

C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework64\v4.0.30319\RegAsm.exe D:\Debug\DotNetLibrary.dll /tlb /codebase.

This runs without an error and the command line tells me that the types have been registered correctly and the tlb has been exported and registered.

It seems like everything worked well and there is also an entry in the registry (Computer\HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\TypeLib) which references my dll but the library doesn't show up in the Reference window in VBA like it did on the other PC.

If I select the tlb, which has been generated by the RegAsm manually, by clicking browse in the Reference Window, it gets added to the list. But if I then start the code I get the Error that the ActiveX component can't create an object.

I'm inspecting this issue since several days now, so it would be very nice if some one could assist me with it.

You use the 64-bit version of Regasm.exe. You probably meant to use the 32-bit version, the most common flavor of Office. — Hans Passant, Mar 25 '20 at 12:06
@HansPassant thank you very much! No it works like a charme! I've never thought about using the 32-bit version. I assumed since my PC runs windows with 64 bit i need to use this version. — Linus, Mar 25 '20 at 13:17
@HansPassant Could you write this up as an Answer? Or, if it's already been answered before, mark as a duplicate? — Cindy Meister, Mar 26 '20 at 15:27

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 31 '20 at 09:08

As @HansPassant mentioned in an comment under my question the simple solution was to use the 32-bit version of regasm (located in C:\Windows\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v4.0.30319) This needs to be done because Microsoft Office products are still 32-bit.

Regasm is not working / ActiveX component can't create object

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