On the Outlook team blog it was announced recently that Exchange Client Extensions (ECEs) will not work with Outlook 2010. This shouldn’t come as a big surprise, they haven’t been a primary extensibility model for Outlook since Outlook 97-98 days. However, many Outlook developers have continued to maintain their ECEs and Microsoft supports them to work on Outlook versions up to Outlook 2007. Here are the suggestions from the blog post about how to move forward… “To redesign your solution, you should

Steve asked me to link to a post from Ryan Gregg detailing some changes in Outlook 2007 SP 2 Beta.  Here is what Steve wrote… Ryan posted an article about some changes we're making in Outlook 2007 SP2. The gist is we're changing Outlook's shutdown behavior to always shutdown regardless of whether there are other running applications using the Outlook Object Model. He's looking for feedback on the logic change, so be sure to send him your comments.

Steve posted a link to the MSDN protocol documentation.  He talks about them here and here as well.

Plan For What You Can Control One of the common scenarios in OOM programming in managed code that required calling GC.Collect() was handling events.  As has been discussed earlier in this series, item references need to be released before they go out of scope.  This includes items passed into event handlers.  Take the ItemSend event for example... // This leaks 'Item' void app_ItemSend( object Item, ref bool Cancel) { } // This does not leak... void app_ItemSend( object Item, ref bool

The Outlook Developer Reference on MSDN has great information on .NET and COM interop which I would consider a prerequisite to any managed code development with Outlook Object Model. It simply isn't enough to know how to accomplish tasks with OOM or to call GC.Collect here and there - it is important to understand the whole story... Introduction to Interoperability Between COM and .NET - This is a short and sweet run through of COM Interop and sets up a foundation for understanding where some of

OOM.NET is not a special API set that was created in managed code.  It is the name I've given to a series of posts I'll do about the “gotchas” of Outlook Object Model development in .NET.  I've compiled some notes over time of the most common issues, how to resolve them, and why they exist.  I'd love to hear back from you on other issues you face with OOM programming in .NET as well so that I can add them to this series... With the introduction of Visual Studio Tools for

With new versions of the product come new KB articles, make sure to take a look at this as you begin Outlook 2007 development... 929592 Known issues with developing Office Outlook 2007 form regions http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;929592 929593 The known issues with the Microsoft Office Outlook 2007 object model http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;EN-US;929593 Update 1-15-2007... Here is another KB article related to Outlook 2007 development... 929591 Known issues

There is a new technet article written by Michael Khalili, an Exchange PM, which talks about some of the ways that Exchange 2007 and Outlook 2007 play together better than their older relatives did. The most exciting piece mentioned in this article for me, as an Outlook/Exchange developer, is the Calendaring piece. Of all the APIs we support it seems to me that most of our questions and bugs center around calendaring, any improvements/simplifications in this area are very welcome. Here is an excerpt

VSTO 2005 SE is a free download for Visual Studio 2005 Tools for Office AND Visual Studio 2005 Professional that will allow you to build VSTO AddIns for Office 2007 applications. Note if you installed the CTP this summer... " VSTO “v3” CTP users: If you previously installed any of the VSTO “v3” CTPs, you need to completely remove the CTP software from your computer before you install VSTO 2005 SE. Because the CTP’s ability to uninstall itself is very limited and unreliable, we strongly recommend

This post by KC Lemson provides some good sample code to view the internet headers of mail messages in Outlook but also illustrates the huge advantage the Outlook 2007 object model provides with the PropertyAccessor object. Notice the differences between the Outlook 2007 code which is done completely through OOM compared to the Outlook 2003 code which requires the use of CDO 1.21 to access properties on the message.