Ryan's Look at Outlook Programmability : Misc

New articles and more

rgregg — Tue, 20 Jun 2006 10:21:20 GMT

If you've been watching the Outlook developer portal recently, as of last Friday you noticed some new technical articles went live.

My first MSDN article, "Code Security Changes in Outlook 2007" went live. This document discusses some of the changes around the object model guard and code security that we've made for Outlook 2007. It also includes a list of blocked/guarded members in the object model for 2007.

Also posted last week was the beta 2 version of our sample add-ins. These samples have all been updated to be fully compatible with Office 2007 beta 2, and are a great resource for learning about some of the new extensibility areas in Outlook 2007. Randy and I have both worked hard on getting these add-ins developed, tested, and ready for you to start taking a look at. However, there are a few known issues with some of the add-ins, but these issues will not prevent you from learning a great deal about new Outlook extensibility. These add-ins will be updated again around RTM to be compatible with the RTM version of Outlook 2007.

In other news last week, a new version of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) was announced. The Cypress release, which should be available around the same time as the Office 2007 RTM, provides support for developing managed-code add-ins for some Office 2007 applications.

Also thanks to everyone who stopped by the VSTO booth in the green technical learning center last week at TechEd in Boston. It was great getting to talk with you about VSTO and your Outlook integrations, and learning more about your solutions!

New Outlook 12 Blogs

rgregg — Wed, 30 Nov 2005 03:08:17 GMT

I’m working on a future post about using DASL syntax language in Outlook and what’s new in this area for Outlook 12. Hopefully I can get enough time to actually get that posted this week.

However, in the mean time, be sure to check out the other Outlook blogs. Will Kennedy, Outlook General Manager, has started talking about Outlook 12 improvements. Also Melissa MacBeth, another PM on Outlook has started blogging about Tasks and Time Management.

As more Outlook blogs come online (or rather if more Outlook blogs come online) I’ll add them to my “Office Blogs” section on the side of my page.

Moving towards the TAP

rgregg — Tue, 12 Jul 2005 07:21:00 GMT

As we get further along in the Office product cycle, we’re getting closer to starting the TAP (Technology Adoption Program) and actually getting the new bits into a limited number of customer hands. What’s great about this is that it means we’ll start getting the first feedback about the new programmability changes that we’ve introduced in Outlook 12. For more information about TAP and the benefits the program can provide, check out MWCC’s post about the program in general.

Unfortunately I still can’t talk a lot about all the changes for a variety of reasons. However, I’m looking forward to the start of hearing customer feed back about the new product features and during the PDC later in the year we’ll be able to show off more of what’s been added to the Outlook OM and our new changes.

In the mean time though I’ve been “playing” with Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office and getting to know that product better along with really diving deep into the world of Outlook programmability. Since I’m still relatively new to Outlook (only been here for almost 7 months now), I want to make sure I better understand the limitations of our current OM and the pain points for Outlook development. Searching the web provides a good resource, but certainly if any of the blog readers out there have anything to comment on let me know!

I also want to apologize for not having more to say right now, but as soon as I can talk publicly about the new work we’ve done you can bet I’ll be sharing everything I can.