A code monkey in Research

The Outlook object model is described in detail in the MSDN library . However, while that tells you what methods, properties and events exist, there's not a huge amount of information about what they're actually for. I found Carter & Lippert 's Visual...

The Research Games team in Microsoft Research, of which I'm a member, has just published its first game, Project Waterloo (or, to give it it's full, if somewhat verbose, name, Microsoft Research Project Waterloo). This is an example of a Colonel Blotto...

Over the past few weeks, I've described the steps involved in creating an Outlook add-in, including ribbon manipulation and access to the Outlook object model. To wrap up, the table of contents for the VSTO add-in project: Introduction - creating...

My first few blog posts were essentially about taking a macro (almost) solution and reimplementing it in C#: this time I'm taking an approach to a problem usually solved using some compiled language and implementing it as a cheap and cheerful macro. It...

The first thing to do to the project started earlier is to add something to the Outlook ribbon. Right click on the project and select "add new item." You'll see two ribbon related options, the first being "Ribbon (Visual Designer)" - this offers an easy...

Quite a while ago I presented a scrappy little macro I created to update version numbers in multiple Visual Studio projects. At the time I commented that Visual Studio 11 wouldn't be supporting macros so, now that VS2012 has RTM'd , here's a "port" to...

There are several ways to integrate your application with Facebook: you can have a standalone application (which uses Facebook for authentication but has a UI totally separate from Facebook apart from login), and there can be two flavours of that, a ...

Despite its ubiquity and value, there are an awful lot of things that annoy us about email - one sin that seems to be almost unforgivable is doing a reply to all ("big R reply") when reply to sender ("little r reply") was intended. I have to say I don...

Thus far we've ended up with a nicely populated mail composition window. It would be nice to offer the facility to see the action status on received messages (OK, you can infer it from the lack of ability to reply, but bear with me for the sake of this...

In the discussion so far the add-in requires the sender to remember to click the no-reply-all button before sending a message. What about causing all newly created messages to have reply-all disabled automatically (though letting the user manually enable...

Socio-Digital Systems , one of the teams I work with, has an opening for a developer if anyone's interested in coming to work here in Cambridge, England. The job ad reads: The Socio-Digital Systems (SDS) group at Microsoft Research in Cambridge is...

A few people have been asking me for something akin to an MSI-based installer for my NoReplyAll tool but I've not been able to treat this as particularly high priority. Those of you with Office 2013 might have noticed Outlook pointing the finger of shame...

As I hinted earlier , I'm finally getting round to describing how we implemented our first Facebook game, Microsoft Research Project Waterloo . The game is between two players, each having one turn. The game board is a number of fields of play - in our...

Last time , I gave an outline of our Facebook game : now I'm going to take a look at the "game engine." The game logic is pretty straightforward: Player one initiates a game by selecting an opponent and specifying the five allocations Player...

Last time we ended up with a single button on the email composition window. It ought to be fairly obvious how to add additional similar buttons to that ribbon to, say, offer the ability to disable the other actions - just replicate the toggleButton XML...

As you'll have no doubt noticed, when you build and run within Visual Studio, Outlook loads the add-in. This is because building the project includes a step for registration with Outlook. (Doing a "build clean" will, symmetrically, unregister it.) This...

When I go searching the web from a desktop browser, I'm lazy. I head straight to a search engine and type a short query: I can get away with a short query because the ease of browsing through a large set of results often outweighs the effort involved...

Writing that post about pausing audio playback reminded me of a little utility I wrote, uh, over a decade ago, which would hide rather than minimize windows, so that I could free up a bit of space on the task bar by not showing the window's icon there...

As I mentioned in an earlier post , Outlook 2013 brings a few new features which I need to integrate with in NoReplyAll ., the main one being ribbon changes when inline responses are used. The What's new for Outlook 2013 developers article describes...

Windows Phone 8 brings with it the ability for a program to set the lockscreen picture; there are already a bunch of apps in the store that cycle through images (including the built in ability to grab pictures from the Bing home page) - however, none...

I'm not really going to go into much detail about the client - it's fairly standard "modern" HTML and JavaScript about which you can find much better information that I could cover here. One reason why I can't say a lot about it is that pretty much all...

If you've got music playing on your PC and then you lock the desktop, the music keeps playing. Sometimes this is what you want, and sometimes it's not... I was dogfooding the recent release of a certain media playing software not so long ago, which...

A new version of the add-in is now available: go to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/60860f41-88ab-4bb4-8104-765feca9cfed/ to start playing with it. New features include nicer buttons (well, I think they're nicer), better indication to...

The last few blog posts have been a rapid walkthrough of our Facebook game . To wrap up, here's the "table of contents" for the posts: Game release annoucement Introduction - quick outline of technologies Server - description of the server...

A new version of the add-in is now available - head to http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/downloads/60860f41-88ab-4bb4-8104-765feca9cfed/default.aspx to get hold of it. The once change since 2.4.0 is a bug fix for error messages appearing when you...