Outlook Developer News
Integrating .NET controls in a folder home page
A folder home page (or FHP) is a web page displayed in an Explorer window in Outlook. A simple FHP might include an Outlook View Control (OVC) instance to show the folder contents, plus other controls to add functionality, such as filtering the view to show only items related to the current user. Two samples are available for more complex implementations using managed code controls.
In the article Outlook Folder Homepage: Hosting WPF, ActiveX and Windows Forms controls, Hülya Pamukçu describes how to incorporate Windows Presentation Foundation controls into an FHP, including a control that wraps an OVC. A complete code sample is available.
An earlier MSDN article, Outlook Customization for Integrating with Enterprise Applications, describes a CRM application that wraps an OVC in a managed code control and hosts it in an FHP. The accompanying sample is written for VSTO 2005, not VSTO 2005 SE or VS 2008, so you won't be able to load the project directly. You should, however, be able to start a new Outlook VSTO add-in project and add the code files from the CRM project to see how it works.
New tools for VSTO developers
Microsoft has released some unsupported, but handy free tools for Visual Studio Tools for Office developers. Of particular interest to Outlook programmers will be the Office Custom UI Manager for coordinating multiple Ribbon, task pane, and form region instances, the VSTO Troubleshooter to help with deployment prerequisites, and, especially for C# developers, the Office Interop API Extensions to handle parameterized and optional properties. See:
More VSTO add-in samples for Outlook 2007
The Office Developers Conference and the release of Visual Studio 2008 have brought a flurry of interest in building add-ins for Outlook using the Visual Studio 2008 platform. Here are some of the sample add-ins and walkthroughs that people have posted recently:
Context menus for sender and recipients
Among the six context menus that Outlook 2007 supports for developers, you won't find the menu that appears when you right-click the sender of a message or one of the recipients. So, I take my hat off to Mac on the microsoft.public.outlook.program_addins newsgroup for pointing out this article:
The secret is that the Additional Actions submenu is populated with the smart tags that are registered for Outlook!
You still can't add items to the main recipient context menu, only to the Additional Actions menu. Access to the main recipient context menu is on my wish list for Outlook 14.
Hotfix for Item.Close problem in Outlook 2003 and other issues
Microsoft has issued a post-SP3 hotfix for Outlook 2003 that should resolve these issues, among others:
- You apply security update 924085 (MS07-003) for Outlook 2003. You close an Outlook item that uses the Item.Close() event. If the currently closed item is discarded by making a call to the Item.Close olDiscard method, you receive an error message.
- When you run a macro that retrieves the date of searched Outlook items, the date may be converted incorrectly according to the current time zone.
- You view a Web page that uses the Outlook View control in your Web browser. If you change an item that is opened in the Outlook View control, Outlook may close unexpectedly.
For more information and for the link to request the hotfix, see:
From the Forums
| VBA Code to suppress/eliminate outlook security... |
| The warning message is 'A program is trying to access email address.....". I use the following code
OlSecurityManager.DisableOOMWarnings = True
But it shows error. How to declare OlSecurityManager? Anyone please help me. |
| Outlook View Controller and IE7 |
| I have OVC working like I want it to in IE7. I'm loading the initial view I want using onpageload script. I'm switching views, I'm launching new items.
The page is running on my local machine (which it will when the solution is complete: it's sales-force... |
| Reading Outlook Custom Form Field Contents... |
| Hello,
we use Outlook forms that contain custom fields. The last recipient in the workflow of the forms shall now have an application that reads the custom fields and adds them to a record in the company SQL Server. I developed a routine in Microsoft... |
| Task Tracking |
| I assign tasks to 6 people in my department, 3 are programmers, 2 are testers and 1 is a document writer. A particular task may go from a programmer to a tester and back-and-forth a few times. Eventually the task goes to the document writer.
Currently... |
| Calendar Invite template |
| i have created a meeting invite template that i wish to send out but the appointment needs to go into another mailbox's calendar that i have attached to my mail profile, at the moment when i send the invite out, the meeting will appear in my calendar... |
| Moving mail back to original folder |
| In our add-in,we are giving user facility to move mails to a folder.Now,this folder would be in primary storage,.pst,but mail could be in a different .pst.Now,we want user to be able to move the mail back to inbox folder of the secondary storage.How can... |
| current email account |
| hi
how Can i know a e-mail of the current user account in outlook? |
| CommandBarPopup does not appear when it should... |
| Hi everyone,
I have done a drop down menu using CommandBarPopup button Share Add-in with C#, and it was ok, I have repeated the same steps in other one and it does not appear anything. I would like to show the information of my contact in this new... |
| Storing an Outlook Folder Location |
| Hello,
In my quest to build a email message parsing tool, I can manually VBA code the folder location I wish to parse. But I'd rather provide a button on the form to which would result in a folder menu for the user to select where the parsing is to... |
| How can I loop saved msg files and rename... |
| Dear all
I am trying to create a app that will loop a folder with msg files, and rename them according to a naming standard of:
<data><Sender><Subject>.msg |
