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Outlook 2007 Programming chapters available on MSDN

Three chapters from Sue Mosher's Microsoft Outlook 2007 Programming book are now available on MSDN:

Sample code for these chapters is available from the get Sue's code link at the top of the page.

Outlook 2007 performance improvements in SP2

Office 2007 Service Pack 2 targets Outlook with a long list of performance improvements related to .ost and .pst files, startup, shutdown, and folder switching. For details, see:

Outlook 2010: No support for Exchange client extensions

Back before Microsoft extended Outlook with support for add-ins, beginning with Outlook 2000, developers added functionality to Outlook by building Exchange client extensions -- or ECEs -- using the Extended MAPI programming interface. Microsoft in fact built its own ECEs to manage such Outlook features as deleted item recovery.

Beginning with Outlook 2010, ECEs will not load in Outlook, according to Randy Byrne of the Outlook team. Randy provides more background on ECEs in his article for the Outlook team blog, where he explains the options that ECE developers face if they want to redesign their applications to work in Outlook 2010 and asks for your feedback, especially your concerns about parity between ECE and add-in capabilities.

Convert a business form to an Outlook custom form

Have you ever wanted to convert a business form to electronic transmission using Outlook? In a detailed step-by-step walkthrough, Jimmy shows you how, with plenty of screen shots for every procedure, including tricky techniques like tab order and validation. 

The walkthrough is for a message form, so it assumes that the organization has an Exchange server where the forms can be published, but the basic form design methods are applicable to any type of form.

Another round of sample VSTO add-ins for Outlook

Here are more sample add-ins using Visual Studio 2008 and Outlook 2007:

From the Forums

Basic Outlook Techniques
moving contacts
I am trying to "import" a distribution list sent in an email to my contacts folder. the directions say to select the attachment in the email and drop into the contacts folder but that doesn't work. is there a way to do this? thanks!!!
Searching for EntryID using DASL
Hi, I'm trying to make a list of opened mail items with the intention of reopening them the next time Outlook starts. I can loop through the Application.Inspectors collection, use TypeOf to identify mail items, and then note their EntryID. But...
Outlook Form Design
Combo Box track changes
Hello. Is it possible to to keep track of the changes of several combo boxes values preferably showing the history of changes in another control (doesnt matter what)? For instance if a user selects a value from a combo box saves the form but returns to...
Prevent custom Tasks from appearing in To-Do...
I have an add-in that creates a custom task (IPM.Task.Deliverable). I need to be able to keep tasks of this type from being shown on the To-Do Bar. I think this has to be possible because Business Contact Manager does this with their "Business Projects"....
Outlook Expert Techniques
VBA Outlook app - Keeping a connection open...
I'm doing a bit of work with an Outlook VBA application that a colleauge created. It's fairly basic, just connects to a sql server and runs some commands, depending on what the user is changing etc. The problem we're having is in trying to speed it up....
GetOccurrence
I am having a problem with the GetRecurrencePattern.GetOccurrence. For now I am calling this on a recurrence that I know exists, I'll deal with viariables later! ;) If I call the following code 'Access the items in the Calendar folder to locate ...
Outlook and .NET
Trapping open mail item event
Hi I am new to creating ol2003 add-in using vs2008. Is there a code example on how to trap event when user opens a mail item in OL so I can choose to either allow user opening of the item or give other options as appropriate? Many Thanks Regards ...
MultiThreading and Outlook
Hi I am reading Emails from outlook in my C#.NET windows application. I am Reading emails from Multiple Mailboxes using GetSharedDefaultFolder method. oNS.Logon("admin", "pwd", false, false); oRep = oNS.CreateRecipient(cUser); ...
Code Essentials
Run Macro to send email with attachment every...
I am trying to have this macro run every 5 minutes after I run the macro for the first time, and continue running every 5 minutes until I close Outlook. I found many examples on how to do this in excel but not in outlook. Sub SendMail() Dim olApp...
Surpressing dialog box when connecting to...
Hello, I've got an interesting problem... I'm running Ruby on Rails on Windows Server 2003 (using Apache though, not IIS) and I have an app that does a test to see if the user provided MAPI credentials are valid in MS Exchange. If the credentials are...

Newest Resources

How to programmatically select a custom Form Region -- Helmut Obertanner demonstrates, with screen shots, how to create a form region for an Outlook 2007 contact form and add a button to the Ribbon to switch the Inspector display to the region.

Customize the built-in Outlook Select Names dialog (or any other) -- Helmut Obertanner demonstrates how to intercept an built-in Outlook dialog and display instead a custom .NET form.

Outlook Forms Step by Step -- Create a check request form and make it available on the company intranet with this 16-part illustrated guide.

Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word, and Outlook -- Eric Carter and Eric Lippert update their book on creating Visual Studio Tools for Office applications to cover Visual Studio 2008 and Office 2007.

Outlook Redemption version 4.7 -- Adds the ability to enumerate nicknames stored in the .nk2 file and an RDOStore2.Searches collection that represents search folders, plus other new properties, methods, and events and various bug fixes.

Outlook-Redemption discussion list -- Yahoo! group for dicussing issues related to the Outlook Redemption COM library

Making a Custom Ribbon Appear Only for a Custom Outlook Form -- Norm Estabrook from the VSTO team shows how to make custom tabs, groups and controls appear only in cases where the user opens a custom form in Outlook.

LINQ to DASL: Changing Appointments with C# and LINQ -- Short video that demonstrates how to use VSTO Power Tools to perform a DASL query on the Calendar folder using the LINQ syntax and then perform additional string value checking with a regular expression

Outlook Context Menus and Creating a Meeting from an Email -- Short video demonstrating how to create a context menu command for sending a meeting request to recipients of an email message. Note: The Inspector wrapper class is extraneous and overcomplicates the project.

How to get the IWin32Window for Outlook -- This C# class from Helmut Obertanner could be used to pass the Outlook as parent to .Net Forms and Messageboxes to prevent those UI elements from being hidden by Outlook windows.

Additional custom panel in Microsoft Outlook -- Lukas Neumann uses Windows API techniques to hack the Outlook user interface and add a custom panel in the Explorer window.

New Outlook VSTO AddIn: How to disable Reply To All and Forward in Outlook 2007 -- This very simple add-in adds controls to the ribbon to disable the Forward and Reply to All actions in the MailItem.Actions collection.

Form region demo - categories text box -- This no-code form region for Outlook 2007 adds a Categories text box to received and sent messages.

Outlook Meeting Tracking Export -- Jaz shows how easy it is to write an Outlook macro to export meeting attendee information to Excel.

Use the Right Events for the Right Cases -- Microsoft's Ryan Gregg explains why the Application.ItemSend and Inspector.Close events are more appropriate in some scenarios than the item-level Send and Close events.

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Hot Code Samples

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Intermediate
C# AddIn sample: InspectorWrapper & CommandBar...
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Advanced
Set color label on appointment
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