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Last fall, the Outlook documentation team approached me about using an Outlook Social Connector provider I built for an internal social network we have here at Microsoft (called OfficeTalk) as an example for a Visual How-To series on MSDN. It took a few months to get it all done, but you can check out...

The Office 2010 PIAs are finally available for download: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/en/details.aspx?FamilyID=938fe8ad-583b-4bd7-a345-23250dc15855

You may remember when I unveiled the Outlook Social Connector Provider Proxy. Well, good news – I have updated the OSC Provider Proxy Library to now support OSC v1.1 and also built it for .NET v3.5 in addition to the v4.0 build available with the original release. Check it out!

Starting in Silverlight 3, the algorithm that SL uses to determine the hosting URL of the SL control doesn’t work properly when the page is viewed as part of an Outlook Folder Home Page. This is actually a known issue and is being looked at for Silverlight 5 but was not discovered early enough...

The Office team put out some Channel9 videos and some tools to help you get your add-ins and applications onto the Office 2010 platform. http://channel9.msdn.com/learn/courses/Office2010/AppCompatUnit/

If you are automating Outlook in a standalone application or other app outside of Outlook and have trouble on some machines with your CreateObject call succeeding when Outlook is not already running, this article may be for you. Have you ever called someone only to be put on hold as soon as they answer...

You may have heard of OfficeTalk . You may have heard of the Outlook Social Connector . As it turns out, my team is responsible for supporting developers building Outlook Social Connector (OSC) providers for their social networks. As a means of learning about how the technology works in preparing myself...

Part 1 It used to be in earlier versions of Exchange, you were able to change the names of the “special” folders, like Inbox, Calendar, Tasks, etc. This is because MAPI keeps track of the Entry ID for these special folders in properties stored on the root folder. As long as the folder never got deleted...

Matt , Rick , and I were working on an issue recently where when an application using EWS would set a contact’s Street address to a value containing a carriage return and line feed, like this: physicalAddress.Street = "1234 56 Ave NE\r\nc/oPatrick Creehan" ; the address card control...

I recently helped a customer with an issue where they were calling ConfigureMsgService and that call was failing, returning an HRESULT of MAPI_E_INVALID_PARAMETER (0x80070057). After debugging it, we established that the reason that ConfigureMsgService was failing was that the PR_PROFILE_HOME_SERVER_ADDRS...

As discussed in Chapter 1 of this captivating series, MAPI contains an interface to allow developers to create and read TNEF data. This interface is the ITnef interface. There are only a few methods in this interface and they are, for the most part, self explanatory. The entire process of creating a...

I’ve worked quite a few cases recently regarding problems some folks have had either reading or composing TNEF content. I’ve learned quite a bit myself as a result, and I thought I’d share. I decided I would do a series of blog posts on the topic and hopefully save some of you the time I spent learning...

So, the Exchange team decided they didn't want to maintain the MAPI documentation anymore since they don't ship MAPI anymore. So the Outlook team stepped up and took over the docs. As such, you can now find them under the Outlook branch in the MSDN left-nav. http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library...

Several million of you have downloaded the Live Search Maps Add-in for Outlook which allows integration in Outlook with maps and has some cool functionality around extending your appointment blocks to account for automatically calculated travel time among other things. We have received a large number...

Misha, a Senior Dev on the VSTO team just posted this blog describing why handling events in managed code can be problematic. This is not news to our team, but he provides a good explanation of why it’s problematic. Misha Shneerson : COM Interop: Handling events has side effects If any of what he says...

We’ve had a lot of folks calling in recently about this one. The symptoms are that if you go to your calendar in Outlook and forward a meeting, the To field is prepopulated with all attendees of the meeting and the Subject field is not prefixed with “FW:.” The common denominator of all victims of this...

I’ve had a couple cases recently where customers were having problems getting into deadlock with one of our modules, usually MAPI or Outlook. There’s one common thread that connects these cases: message pumps. Your application has to make a remote call to a server object living in a different process...

So I've finally done it. I made the first stab at a two-way stssync protocol server. You can get it here: http://www.codeplex.com/stssyncprovider I'd love to have some of you start using it and report issues you find with it so I can continue to improve it. I know there are issues already, but it should...

There exists a scenario in which attendees to a meeting in Outlook will receive an updated meeting request from the originator that appears to be "out-of-date." In the InfoBar, Outlook will display a message that says "This request is out-of-date." If the attendee attempts to accept the meeting request...

Many of you have been using the Custom Calendar Provider samples created by Stephen Toub and I: Stephen Toub - Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2003 Custom Calendar Providers for Outlook 2007 The development team has finally documented pretty much everything you need to know in order to build your...

One of the major requirements most developers are up against these days is ensuring their code runs as fast as possible. No one likes to wait for an application to run, they want seamless, invisible, instant speed. Multithreading is becoming more popular now that many desktops and certainly most servers...

If you've developed a custom message store and you can't get Outlook to display RTF or HTML content, check the length of your EntryIDs. If your RTF content is really just wrapped HTML content or you are providing PR_HTML, and for some reason Outlook 2003 won't display your HTML content, it may be the...

If you are developing or have developed a MAPI store provider for use in Outlook and are trying to support folder homepages in your store, you are probably familiar with the PR_FOLDER_WEBVIEWINFO property. This property is undocumented and not supported, but I'll assume for the sake of this article that...

If you have written or use an application that uses CDO 1.21 (cdo.dll) that accesses your Calendar and you have users who complain that some recurring appointments are not appearing in Free/Busy in Outlook, this may be for you. When a recurring appointment is created in Outlook, you may not realize...

We want to know why you're still using ECEs as opposed to an add-in. Please hop over to Stephen Griffin 's blog and let us know: http://blogs.msdn.com/stephen_griffin/archive/2007/10/12/whither-ece.aspx