Some of you may or may not be aware that alongside with the legacy COM-based Office client object models, Office 2013 supports a new apps for Office developer platform. This blog post is intended to help new and existing Office developers understand the main differences between the COM-based object models...

Do you use SharePoint and Outlook? I recently acquired an article and sample code from one of our Microsoft consultants, Ben Roscorla, to show how to create an Outlook add-in to support a functionally rich and yet visually consistent experience to attach SharePoint documents to an email message. The...

In Microsoft Outlook, items such as MailItem , ContactItem and AppointmentItem have similar properties and methods. For example, the Application , Attachments , Body , Categories , and Class properties, and Close , Copy , and Display methods are common to all Outlook item objects. The COM-based Outlook...

I’d like to share with those of you who are new to Office solutions development a few tips about using Office developer documentation. Where Like most Microsoft products, our most up-to-date Office developer documentation is published on MSDN Library . The most common ways to find content...

Our Office Dev Docs Team blog has been laying low while the team is heads-down authoring new content for our developers. Would you like to indicate the top 4 types of documentation that you find most helpful to you? Conceptual - what is the feature for, how does it work, why would one want to...

The Outlook 2010 MAPI Reference has recently been updated on MSDN. The Nickname Cache topic is now in sync with my earlier blog post Programmatically Accessing the Nickname Cache in Outlook 2010 . What's New in This Edition lists the following updates: Using Microsoft Outlook 2010 and 64-bit...

A few customers have asked about how to run the time-reporting add-in that was published on MSDN as Creating a Simple Time-Reporting Tool Based on the Outlook 2010 Calendar , and discussed in the blog post Time-Reporting Tool now Available as an Outlook Add-in! In general, because the main reason...

Attaching a file to a Microsoft Outlook mail item is one of the most popular customer actions in Outlook. Naturally, many power users also ask how to do this programmatically. The Outlook object model provides the Attachment object, Attachments.Add method, and an Attachments property for each of...

Often I see customers on forums asking how to display custom user interface in the Office Fluent ribbon under some specific conditions. For example, how to display a custom ribbon only for mail inspectors, or, how would one tell the inspector is in compose mode and not read mode. Browsing just the titles...

I recently chatted with our MAPI expert Stephen Griffin and would like to share what I learned about the Outlook nickname cache. The nickname cache is the list of recipient names that is displayed when you insert names in the To, Cc, or Bcc field in an Outlook email or meeting request. The nickname...

Are you interested in learning to develop solutions for Outlook? The Outlook Developer Roadmap puts the the building blocks in clearer perspective. The Outlook Developer Roadmap is the latest in a series of Office developer roadmaps to help developers learn about available APIs and technologies supported...

Just wanted to provide a quick summary of content published on MSDN for Office client applications in April, 2011: API References and SDKs Office 2010 Primary Interop Assembly Reference (MSDN refresh) Open XML SDK 2.0 for Microsoft Office (April 2011 Refresh) Visio 2010...

API References and SDKs Component API Reference for Office 2010 Outlook 2010 Developer Reference (MSDN refresh) Outlook 2010 Primary Interop Assembly Reference (MSDN refresh) OneNote Developer Reference: Application Interface Technical Articles ...

The time reporting macro that I blogged about a few months ago has been implemented as a C# Outlook 2010 add-in. The add-in's Visual Studio project is now available for download as part of the Visual How To Creating a Simple Time-Reporting Tool Based on the Outlook 2010 Calendar . This add-in has significant...

Do you know about the new Outlook add-in that automates highlighting of your search string in an email message? The Visual How To, Automating Search Highlighting in Outlook 2010 , provides a real add-in that you can build in Visual Studio and run with Outlook 2010, and that improves your experience searching...

Frequently we come across the question “How do I extend Outlook to do <a task>”. Depending on how extensive the task is, you might look for your answer in one or more of the following ways: Use a search engine to see if someone has posted a solution to a similar question on...

I’d like to demonstrate a technique that helps automating email replies – when creating a reply to a message, search for a specific string, such as a reference number or item number, from the original message; dynamically create a greeting using the search result, and then automatically insert...

I last blogged about using the Microsoft Outlook Social Connector (OSC) provider extensibility to create an OSC provider. You can explicitly implement the provider extensibility interfaces of OSC 1.1. Alternatively, you can use the OSC Provider Proxy Library that Patrick Creehan created and then updated...

In my recent posting about a time-reporting macro, I mentioned a workaround to have the macro include appointments that fall outside of the normal work hours set in the Outlook Options dialog box. Alert : If you have appointments in your date range that start and end before the beginning of work hours...

This week our group published the Outlook 2010 Auxiliary Reference , and updated the Outlook 2010 MAPI Reference ! The two references have been reorganized such that all content pertaining to MAPI for Outlook is now centralized in the Outlook 2010 MAPI Reference. The Outlook 2010 Auxiliary Reference...

In the Outlook object model, the Table object provides a light-weight row-set that allows fast enumeration and filtering of items in a folder. Each row in a Table corresponds to an item, and each column in the Table corresponds to a property of the item. You can call Folder.GetTable to obtain a Table...

Microsoft Outlook supports properties for items and folders. For example, a MailItem object has built-in properties such as the To , Subject , and Body properties, and a Folder object has built-in properties such as the Name and CurrentView properties. Developers can create custom properties for items...

The Scenario Do you sometimes wonder how time slipped by during the work day, and you can’t recall what projects you worked on or how much time you spent on them? I usually record how I spend my time in the Outlook calendar. For example, today, I did the following: · I spent one hour...

Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Helmut Obertanner*, published two articles on MSDN today: Developing an Inspector Wrapper for Outlook 2010 Enforcing Business Rules in Outlook 2010 Inspector Wrapper An inspector in Microsoft Outlook is a window that displays an...

Today we published a few Office 2010 object model references on the MSDN Library: Access 2010 Developer Reference Excel 2010 Developer Reference Outlook 2010 Developer Reference Project 2010 Developer Reference Word 2010 Developer Reference These versions are currently the most...