September, 2010

My dad read through my blog yesterday. He sent me this video, which he says makes far more sense to him. I think I agree:

Turbo Encabulator

The September 2010 Release (build 6.0.0.1022) is live: http://mfcmapi.codeplex.com.

My work the past two months on MFCMAPI was all over the map, no real focus. I fixed a few bugs, added some Smart View parsing, and made opening random profile sections a bit easier.

Here's a change list - see the Issue Tracker on Codeplex for more details, or look at the code:

• SmartView: Parsing for PR_USERFIELDS (MSDN documentation is on the way!)
• Profile Sections: The old Open Profile Section dialog has been replaced with a new one with a drop down for selecting known profile sections. Also, the parser which converts what you typed to a GUID is much improved – braces and dashes are now optional. Finally, since what a GUID looks like in memory or in the registry differs from the “canonical” form, there’s now a handy-dandy checkbox to indicate when you need your string byte swapped.
• IMsgServiceAdmin2: Hate the way MFCMAPI has to mark profile sections before calling CreateMsgService? By using IMsgServiceAdmin2, this problem is avoided. (MSDN documentation for this interface is also on the way!)
• Bug: Importing from MSG files allows multiple files again, and will stop importing everything to the Associated Contents table.
• Bug: You can now create empty string properties – not sure how long ago I broke this.

Enjoy.

In Outlook 2010, there’s a new feature in the Address Book which I’ll call “Choose automatically”. You’ll find it in the Address Book in Tools/Options under the section “When opening the address book, show this address list first:”. It looks like this:

We added this feature to support MultiEx. Before we put the feature in, if you had multiple Exchange mailboxes in the profile, you could only pick one GAL to be your default. If your current mailbox didn’t use that GAL, tough. With “Choose automatically” enabled, Outlook will pick the most appropriate GAL or contact folder for the current mailbox.

I’ll leave the details about which address book gets selected here to someone else. The key issue from a MAPI perspective is that with “Choose automatically” enabled, the Address Book dialog no longer defaults to the container specified by SetDefaultDir. This can result in a poor experience for third party address book providers. Fortunately, you can turn “Choose automatically” off via a setting in the profile.

You’ll find the setting in the IID_CAPONE_PROF profile section. This profile section is widely known on the Internets, but hasn’t been documented before. Here’s the definition:

// Capone profile section
// {00020D0A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}
DEFINE_OLEGUID(IID_CAPONE_PROF, 0x00020d0a, 0, 0);

You can open that profile section and toggle the feature on and off by setting the PR_AB_CHOOSE_DIRECTORY_AUTOMATICALLY property:

#define PR_AB_CHOOSE_DIRECTORY_AUTOMATICALLY PROP_TAG( PT_BOOLEAN, 0x3D1C)

Enjoy!