I had the same issue. I fixed it by opening the reference properties and setting both “Copy Local” and “Embed Interop Types” to “Yes”.
Update: This actually does the same thing as adding these 2 lines to the COM reference in the .csproj file.
<COMReference Include="Microsoft.Office.Core">
...
<EmbedInteropTypes>True</EmbedInteropTypes>
<Private>true</Private>
</COMReference>
The “Private” tag isn’t mentioned in the accepted answers, but it prevents a lot of problems.