Office Development with Visual Studio : Outlook 2007

Migrating an Outlook Solution to .NET Framework 4 in Visual Studio 2010 (Norm Estabrook)

VSTO Team — Wed, 16 Dec 2009 22:33:37 GMT

Visual Studio can help migrate your Outlook solutions from .NET Framework 3.5 to the .NET Framework 4. However, you still have to do a few things manually to make it all work.

Beth Massi converts an Outlook Solution that targets the .NET Framework 3.5 to an Outlook Solution that targets the .NET Framework 4 client profile in this very cool and informative blog entry - Migrating an Outlook Client to .NET Framework 4 in Visual Studio 2010.

Making a Custom Group Appear in the Message Tab of a Mail Item (Norm Estabrook)

VSTO Team — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:14:38 GMT

You can add a custom group to the Message tab of an Outlook mail item. For example, here is a custom group named "MyCoolGroup" that I added to the message tab of a new message:

Outlook lets you open a message in the following two modes:

Compose (you are drafting a new message).
Read (you are reading a message).

Making a custom group appear for only one of these modes is pretty easy. Making it appear for both modes is a tad more challenging. That is because the control ID of the Message tab in read mode is different than the control ID of the Message tab in compose mode. When you design your custom group in the VSTO Ribbon designer, you can only specify one control ID. This means that when you run the project, the custom group will only appear in the Message tab of a compose window or the Message tab of a read window depending on which control ID you specify at design-time.

If you want the group to appear in both versions of the Message tab (read and compose), you have to do a bit more work. Here is how you make the group appear for both modes:

First, add a Ribbon (Visual Designer) to an Outlook 2007 add-in project.

Then, set the RibbonType property of the Ribbon to Microsoft.Outlook.Mail.Read as follows:

On the Ribbon designer, add a group to a tab and customize the group as desired.

On the Ribbon designer, select the tab, open the Properties window, and then set the OfficeId of the tab to TabReadMessage. TabReadMessage is the control ID of the default tab that appears on the Ribbon of a mail message that is open in read mode.

Ok. Now when you run the project, your custom group will appear only if you open a mail item in read mode. Now you need to add second Ribbon to your project to display this custom group in a mail item that is open in compose mode.

Add a second Ribbon (Visual Designer) to the project. Then, set the RibbonType property of the Ribbon to Microsoft.Outlook.Mail.Compose as follows:

On the Ribbon designer, select the tab of the second Ribbon, open the Properties window, and then set the OfficeId of the tab to TabNewMailMessage. TabNewMailMessage is the control ID of the default tab that appears on the Ribbon of a mail message that is open in compose mode.

I know what your thinking. Do you mean I have to create two separate custom groups? That defeats the whole point of trying to do this right? Yes that would. Fortunately, you don’t have to create two custom groups. You only have to create two Ribbons as I have shown here. You can use the same custom group in both Ribbons. Here is how:

Open the first Ribbon that you created in the Ribbon Designer. In the Ribbon Designer, select your custom group. In the Properties window, set the Modifiers property of the group to Public.

Open the code file of the second Ribbon that you created (called Ribbon2 in my project).

In the constructor of the second Ribbon, add the custom group from Ribbon1 to Ribbon2 as follows:

public Ribbon2()
{
    InitializeComponent();
    Ribbon1 firstRibbon = new Ribbon1();
    this.tab1.Groups.Add(firstRibbon.group1);
}

You can read more about adding custom groups to built-in tabs in the following MSDN articles:

How to: Customize a Built-in tab

How to: Get Started Customizing the Ribbon

Ribbon Designer

Customizing a Ribbon for Outlook

Office Development with Visual Studio 2008 Tutorial Series Started (Beth Massi)

VSTO Team — Wed, 14 Oct 2009 16:25:36 GMT

Robert Green, VSTO MVP, has started a series of tutorials on building on Office 2007! Thanks Robert!

In this first of a series of tutorials on building applications on Office you’ll learn how to create an Outlook 2007 customer appointment management solution using Visual Studio 2008. This step-by-step tutorial also includes full source code in Visual Basic and C#. Check out the tutorial on the VSTO Developer Center:

Building an Office Business Application Part 1 - Scheduling Customer Appointments

If you’re just getting started with Office development in Visual Studio, this is a great place to start.

Enjoy!

Do Your Outlook UI Elements Need Counseling? - Get your Form Regions, Ribbons, and Task Panes Talking to Each Other Again (Norm Estabrook)

VSTO Team — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:30:31 GMT

So you want to open a task pane by using a button on the Ribbon. You also want a form region that appears in an e-mail item to detect the state of a control on a custom task pane so that you can add or remove an option that appears in a Ribbon menu right? Ok, I completely made this scenario up. But at some point, somewhere along the way, you might say to yourself – how do I get to that gallery on my Ribbon from my task pane? or how do I enable the user to populate that combo box on the form region by selecting a control on the Ribbon? Well if that describes something that you are trying to do, then this post is for you. Let’s start with Ribbons. The other two (form regions and task panes) are bit more troublesome.

Ribbons

Ribbon controls are the easiest to access from other areas of your application. Assuming that your custom Ribbon is named Ribbon1, here is what you do:

ThisRibbonCollection ribbonCollection =
Globals.Ribbons
[Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.ActiveInspector()];
ribbonCollection.Ribbon1.comboBox1.Text = "Hello World";

You can read more about this here.

Form Regions

For the VB folks, this is a snap. C# developers have to do a bit more work. That is because by default, in a C# project, the controls that you add to a form region are private. For each control that you want to access, you have to set the Modifiers property of the control to Internal or Public. For example:

You can then add code to access the control. For example, assuming that your form region is named FormRegion1, you could use the following code:

WindowFormRegionCollection formRegions =
    Globals.FormRegions
        [Globals.ThisAddIn.Application.ActiveInspector()];
formRegions.FormRegion1.textBox1.Text = "Hello World";

You can read more about this here.

Custom Task Panes

Controls on task panes require the same tweaks described for form regions above. Here is an example of how to get to a button on a task pane. This example makes the following assumptions:

The user control of the custom task pane is named MyUserControl.
The task pane is named myCustomTaskPane and it is declared as public in your code.

((MyUserControl)Globals.ThisAddIn.myCustomTaskPane.Control).button1.Text = "It Worked";

If have not yet created a custom task pane, see this topic and it will all make sense.

As a side note, if you are adding custom task panes to Outlook Inspector windows, you have to write a bit of code to map each Inspector window with it’s own instance of a custom task pane. If you don’t do this mapping, you get all kinds of wacky issues. For an example of how to do this, see the following article.

For the sake of being thorough, here is an example of how you can access a task pane created by using the guidance in that article.

private void toggleButton1_Click(object sender, RibbonControlEventArgs e)
{
    Outlook.Inspector inspector = (Outlook.Inspector)e.Control.Context;
    InspectorWrapper inspectorWrapper = Globals.ThisAddIn.InspectorWrappers[inspector];
    CustomTaskPane taskPane = inspectorWrapper.CustomTaskPane;
    if (taskPane != null)
    {
        taskPane.Visible = ((RibbonToggleButton)sender).Checked;
        taskPane.DockPosition = Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoCTPDockPosition.msoCTPDockPositionBottom;
        taskPane.Height = 475;
    }
}

Hope this helps!

Norm E.

TechEd Sessions on Office Development

VSTO Team — Fri, 08 May 2009 00:16:02 GMT

If you’re going to TechEd in Los Angeles next week, then don’t miss these four sessions:

DTL03-INT Meet the Microsoft Visual Studio Team
Christin Boyd, Eric Carter, Paul Yuknewicz, Jay Schmelzer, Dustin Campbell, Jonathan Aneja, Luke Hoban, Igor Zinkovsky, Faisal Nasir, Harry Pierson, Lisa Feigenbaum
Mon 5/11 2:45 PM-4:00 PM | Blue Theater 1

OFC325 Building Custom Applications in Microsoft Office Outlook 2007
Ty Anderson, Damon Armstrong
Tue 5/12 2:45 PM-4:00 PM | Room 408A

DTL324 - Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Overview for the Business Application Developer
Jay Schmelzer
Tue 5/12 4:30 PM-5:45 PM | Room 515B

OFC324
Advanced Microsoft Office Word and Excel 2007 Development in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 with Visual Studio Tools for Office
Eric Carter
Thursday 5/14 1:00PM-2:15PM | Room 515A

Of course, there are a dozen other sessions that appeal to Office developers and SharePoint developers. These are the four that I highly recommend. Originally I was going to list the 3 not-to-be-missed sessions, but then I couldn’t drop any of these from my list, so we have 4 Must See Sessions!

If you’re not going to TechEd, then please click the links on these speakers’ names to read their blogs where the will eventually post some of their demo code. Expect the posts to happen the Monday after their sessions. In the case of Eric Carter, he would probably love it if you’d buy his book, Visual Studio Tools for Office 2007: VSTO for Excel, Word and Outlook. Or you could just download a zip file with all of the of code from the book here. That should keep you busy for a while. The explanations in the book really do add to the overall value. I should credit the co-author, Eric Lippert. Both men are brilliant and funny, and very modest. At the Holiday Party this year, Eric Carter got up to sing karaoke and astounded us all with a bouncy rendition of “Sesame Street.”

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager, Visual Studio

Here is a Way to Get the ID of a Built-in Outlook Command Bar Menu (Norm Estabrook)

VSTO Team — Fri, 01 May 2009 00:09:27 GMT

Recently, a forum poster asked us how he could add a submenu item to a built-in menu item in Outlook. Note that these are not controls that appear on the Ribbon of an Outlook item, but rather the menus that drop down from the top of the Outlook Explorer such as the View menu and the Tools menu.

So one way to do this (In fact the only way that I know of) is to use the example shown in the following MSDN topic - How to: Add Custom Menus and Menu Items to Outlook.

You can’t just use the example as is. You will need to add a line of code to get a handle to a built-in menu. The following example gets a handle to the Junk E-Mail menu that appears off of the Actions menu of the Outlook Explorer window.

Office.CommandBarPopup junkEmailMenu = (Office.CommandBarPopup)
this.Application.ActiveExplorer().CommandBars.FindControl
(Office.MsoControlType.msoControlPopup, 31353, missing, missing);

Note the ID number shown in the second parameter to the FindControl method. How on earth did I know that the Junk E-Mail menu is the 31353 menu? The answer is … Not very easily. In fact to obtain that ID, I wrote a small Outlook add-in that iterates through all menus in Outlook and prints out their corresponding codes. I figured that I would share this with you in case you ever have a similar scenario.

Two notes about the sample below: First - this is a C# example, so my apologies to VB’ers. Second - this example is meant to be used in a Visual Studio 2008 Outlook (2007 or 2003) add-in project. These projects automatically include the appropriate using statements that enable you to use the prefix “Office” in place of “Microsoft.Office.Core” when referring to some objects etc.

Ok. Here is the code:

public partial class ThisAddIn
{
    private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
    {
        Outlook.Application app = this.Application;
        //Create a new txt file to record controls' list

        System.IO.StreamWriter sw = System.IO.File.CreateText
            (@"C:\Outlook Menus.txt");

        //loop through Outlook ActiveExplorer CommandBars to get all CommandBars

        foreach (Office.CommandBarControl cb in app.ActiveExplorer().CommandBars.ActiveMenuBar.Controls)
        {
            PrintMenuItems(cb, sw);
        }

        sw.Close();

    }

    // Recursive method for printing menus and nested menus.
    // Either the menu is a commandbarpopup (contains submenus)
    // Or it is a commandbarbutton (contains no submenus)

    private void PrintMenuItems(object menuItem, System.IO.StreamWriter sw)
    {
        if (menuItem as Office.CommandBarButton == null)
        {
            // This is a menu bar popup control.
            sw.WriteLine((menuItem as Office.CommandBarPopup).Caption +
                "\t" + (menuItem as Office.CommandBarPopup).Id.ToString());

            if ((menuItem as Office.CommandBarPopup).accChildCount > 0)
            {
                for (int j = 1; j <= (menuItem as Office.CommandBarPopup).accChildCount; j++)
                {
                    PrintMenuItems((menuItem as Office.CommandBarPopup).get_accChild(j), sw);
                }
            }
        }
        else
        {
            // Must be a command
            sw.WriteLine("\t" + (menuItem as Office.CommandBarControl).Caption +
                "\t" + (menuItem as Office.CommandBarControl).Id.ToString());
        }

    }

Enjoy!

Norm E.

Making a Custom Ribbon Appear Only for a Custom Outlook Form (Norm Estabrook)

VSTO Team — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:09:46 GMT

Many of you have posted questions to the VSTO Forum about how to make custom tabs, groups and controls appear only in cases where the user opens a custom form in Outlook.

The reason why that is difficult to accomplish is because there is no way to specify the names of custom forms in the Ribbon Designer. You can only specify inspector window types.

So if I set the RibbonType property of the Ribbon to “Microsoft.Outlook.Mail.Compose”, then the Ribbon controls appear for all new mail items including items that I create by using a custom mail form. So how can I make sure that the Ribbon controls only appear in my custom mail form?

One possible workaround is to show and hide controls based on the message class of an Outlook form. It seemed to work for me and here is how I did it.

In the Ribbon designer, set the Visible property of your custom controls to false. At this point, those controls will not appear in any Outlook form custom or otherwise.

Next, add a property to the ThisAddIn class that stores the name of a custom message class as follows:

private string strMessageClass = "";
public string MessageClass
{
    get
    {
        return strMessageClass;
    }
    set
    {
        strMessageClass = value;
    }
}

Create an event handler for the NewInspector event. This event is raised every time a new Outlook inspector is open. The item that opens in the inspector has a message class name. For example, if you open a standard mail item, the message class name of the item is “IPM.Note”. A custom form based on a standard email form might have the message class name “IPM.Note.MyCustomForm”.

In the event handler, set your custom string property to the message class name of the open item. Here is an example:

private Outlook.Inspectors inspectors;
private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
    inspectors = this.Application.Inspectors;
    inspectors.NewInspector +=
        new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.InspectorsEvents_NewInspectorEventHandler
            (Inspectors_NewInspector);

}

void Inspectors_NewInspector(Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Inspector Inspector)
{
    Outlook.MailItem tmpMailItem = (Outlook.MailItem)Inspector.CurrentItem;
    if (tmpMailItem != null)
        MessageClass = tmpMailItem.MessageClass;
}

In the load event of your Ribbon class, check your custom string property to determine the message class of the item that is attempting to load your custom Ribbon. If the name matches the name of your custom message class, you can show the controls on your custom Ribbon. Here is an example:

private void Ribbon1_Load(object sender, RibbonUIEventArgs e)
{
    if (Globals.ThisAddIn.MessageClass == "IPM.Note.Norm")
    {
        group1.Visible = true;
        Globals.ThisAddIn.MessageClass = "";
    }
    

}

Share a Ribbon Customization between Office Applications (Norm Estabrook)

VSTO Team — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 23:01:00 GMT

We have received feedback from several folks that they would like design one Ribbon by using the Ribbon visual designer, and then re-use that same Ribbon in more than one Office application. This approach makes sense. If my custom tab looks the same for each application, I really don’t want to create the same Ribbon in four separate Office projects.

So I poked around to see if this was possible. I caught up with one of developers who created the VSTO Ribbon designer and he showed me exactly how to do it.

First, add a Ribbon to a VSTO project. Then, copy the Ribbon code files to a class library project. Finally, add a reference to the class library assembly from within any VSTO project and voila. Well, it’s a tad more challenging. Here are all the detailed steps.

Create the Ribbon

1. Create a 2007 Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, or Word project in Visual Studio. For the purpose of these steps, create a C# project and name the project RibbonStarterProject.

2. Add a Ribbon (Visual Designer) item to the project. For the purpose of these steps, accept the default name “Ribbon1”.

3. Save and close the project.

Create a Class Library Project

1. Create a new class library project in Visual Studio. For the purpose of these steps, name the project SharedRibbonLibrary.

2. Add a project reference to the Microsoft.Office.Tools.Common.v9.0 assembly.

3. On the Project Menu in Visual Studio, click Add Existing Item.

4. In the Add Existing Item dialog box, browse to the “RibbonStarterProject” project directory, select the Ribbon.cs file, and click Add.

Ribbon1.cs is copied to the project directory and appears beneath the project node in Solution Explorer.

5. Double-click Ribbon1.cs.

The Ribbon designer appears.

6. From the Office Ribbon Controls tab of the Toolbox, drag a button onto group1.

7. Click button1 to select it.

8. In the Properties window, set Modifiers to Public.

Note: By default, controls that you add to the Ribbon are Internal. That makes them only accessible to code inside the same assembly. However, when you access these controls, you will be accessing them through an assembly reference. Therefore, to reach them from code, you must make them public. More on this soon.

9. Right-click the Ribbon designer, and then click Properties.

10. In the Properties window, click the RibbonType property, and then select the Ribbon ID’s of the applications or Outlook Inspector windows in which you want the Ribbon to appear. For more information about this property, see the MSDN reference topic for the RibbonType property.

11. In Solution Explorer, right-click Ribbon1.cs, and then click View Code.

12. Change the namespace of the class to “SharedRibbonLibrary”.

13. Repeat this step for the Ribbon1.designer.cs file.

14. Compile and save the SharedRibbonLibrary project. You can now use the resulting assembly in any VSTO project that supports the Ribbon.

Consume the Ribbon Customization

1. Create 2007 Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, or Word project.

2. Add a reference to the SharedRibbonLibrary assembly.

3. Add the following code to the ThisAddin, ThisWorkbook, or ThisDocument class of your project. This code overrides the CreateRibbonExtensibilityObject method and returns the Ribbon to the Office application.

protected override Microsoft.Office.Core.IRibbonExtensibility

CreateRibbonExtensibilityObject()

{

return new Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbon.RibbonManager(

new Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbon.OfficeRibbon[] { new

SharedRibbonLibrary.Ribbon1() });

}

4. Add a new class to the project. Accept the default name “Class1.cs”.

5. Replace the code in the Class1 file with the following:

partial class ThisRibbonCollection : Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbon.RibbonReadOnlyCollection

{

internal SharedRibbonLibrary.Ribbon1 Ribbon1

{

get { return this.GetRibbon<SharedRibbonLibrary.Ribbon1>(); }

}

Ok – You are done! You can now access the Ribbon and the button that you added to the Ribbon in your code. Lets try by handling an event in the consuming project.

Handle the Button Click Event

1. Add the following code to the startup event handler of project.

Globals.Ribbons.Ribbon1.button1.Click += new EventHandler<Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbon.RibbonControlEventArgs>(button1_Click);

2. Add the following event handler to your project:

void button1_Click(object sender,

Microsoft.Office.Tools.Ribbon.RibbonControlEventArgs e)

{

System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("I can handle events!");

}

3. Run the project.

4. When the Office application opens, click the Add-Ins tab, and then click your button.

A message that says “I can handle events!” appears.

- Norm Estabrook

Programming Writer for BizApps User Education

Office Developer Conference: Developing and Deploying Office Solutions with VS 2008 (Christin Boyd)

VSTO Team — Sat, 16 Feb 2008 06:58:00 GMT

Last Monday I presented session CLI202: Developing and Deploying Smart Clients for Office at the Office Developer Conference in San Jose. This blog post is a mini-version of the slides and demos from my session. The session was not recorded.

Slide 1: Office Development In VS 2008

You can develop either Office 2003 or Office 2007 solutions with VS 2008
Project Migration Wizard

Slide 2: Excel And Ribbon Demo

Excel and Word templates let you program to the document surface
Word Content Controls, Bookmarks
Excel cells, Named Ranges, and Charts
Your custom Ribbon tabs can scope to just a document, or to the entire Office application
Demo code: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386198.aspx

Slide 3: Databinding

Drag n Drop
Complex data sources
Services (demo Amazon Web Service)
UI elements bind to a DataSet

Excel Ranges
Word Content Controls, bookmarks
Outlook Form Region controls
WinForm and WPF controls in a Task Pane

Demo code: Databound Word Content Controls http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb157875.aspx

Slide 4: Developing Outlook Add-Ins

Multiple Document Interface
Inspector Windows
Folders and Forms
Developer UI Elements

Ribbon and Menus
Custom Task Panes
Outlook Form Regions

Outlook Task Pane Demo code: I used a variation on this code http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb772082.aspx
Outlook Form Region Demo code: not online yet, stay tuned to this blog!

Slide 5: Deploying Office Solutions

Office Security is crucial
Office 2003 deployment is different from 2007
Office 2003 deployment model in VS 2008 is the same as it was in VSTO 2005
Office 2007 solution deployment is completely new technology in VS 2008

Leverages ClickOnce Cache
ClickOnce Automatic Update and Rollback
Prerequisites included in Setup
(runtime and .NET Framework)

Demo steps: http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb608592.aspx
Lots of session questions were about deployment and I will try to address those questions in subsequent blog posts here.

Slide 6: Best Practices

Only install one version of Office on your development computer
If you must develop or maintain solutions for both Office 2003 and Office 2007 then:

Ask your boss for a second computer :-)
Dual-boot
Use Virtual PC

Test your deployment on another computer that does NOT have Visual Studio installed

I use a test matrix of Virtual PC images on an external hard drive

Slide 7: Resources

http://Blogs.msdn.com/VSTO
http://MSDN.Microsoft.com/Office
Samples in the MSDN Library http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/z63ctsh2.aspx
Videos and Whitepapers in MSDN http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb871648.aspx

I hope this information is useful as a reference for those who attended my session and for those of you who were unable to attend.

-Christin Boyd, Program Manager

Out Loud for Outlook: Speech Recognition & Synthesis (Nathan Carlson)

VSTO Team — Sat, 02 Feb 2008 00:34:00 GMT

Nathan Carlson developed a creative solution for Outlook 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 (codename Orcas). The Out Loud for Outlook project started as a dogfood testing project last summer. For those of you unfamiliar with the dogfood testing practice at Microsoft, it's a term for testing our own products in real-world solutions while they are still in beta so we can personally experience any problems or bugs. The dogfood tests helped us find and fix dozens of bugs.

Out Loud for Outlook allows you to create a new Outlook rule that reads your designated email out loud when it triggers. You can also use voice commands with a good microphone to open and navigate through your emails.

Nathan recently updated the solution to run on the release version of Visual Studio 2008. The Out Loud for Outlook source code is available for download on the new Code Gallery site.

The sample demonstrates:

Basics of developing an Outlook 2007 Add-in.
Consuming Outlook events.
Accessing e-mails.
Creating a Custom Action for Outlook rules.
Using Speech Synthesis.
Using Speech Recognition.