Newbie developing Excel app in VS2008 - deployment problem

I have been sent to this group from excel.programming. I am an experienced
developer using vba in Excel and VB6, but now I have started to develop an
Excel addin in VS2008/VB.net.

I used the "Excel 2003 workbook" built-in template in VS2008 to give me the
basic framework for the project, importing an existing Excel spread*** as
my starting point. Everything went fine in the VS environment and the code
works when running from within VS.

Problem part 1
I now want to deploy the spread***, so I used the "Publish" option under
the build menu to create the "publish" folder. This contained three items:- a
subfolder with a bunch of dlls, the report.application and the report.xls.

When I run the report.application it reports an error "Cannot continue. The
application is improperly formatted. Contact the vendor for assistance".
Clicking on the Details... button brings up a log that shows, amongst other
things,
"+ Application manifest is not semantically valid
+ Application reference identity must be strongly named"

Problem part 2
Going another tack, I thought maybe there should be a setup project within
the solution, so I created one, following instructions from various helpful
places. I eventually successfully built the setup project, and ran the
setup.exe to install the application. This appeared to work and I have a
folder under C:\program files\ with all the dlls and the xls application.

However, when I run the .xls file, I get the error message "The
customisation assembly could not be found or could not be loaded".

Help!
I suspect I should have known about the complexity of vb.net/add-in
deployment before I launched into developing the app in VS2008, but it all
looked quite simple at the outset. Now that I have invested quite a lot of
time in developing the vb.net code I don't really want to revert it all back
to simple, friendly old vba.

Could someone advise me on what I am not doing, or not doing right, so that
I can get this app up an running?

Thanks for your help.
.

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