Miscellaneous Debris

Preventing Outlook from closing with Alt-F4

I have come to the realization, at some point, that I never want to close Outlook. Really, there's no reason for me to shut it down except when doing something special, like freeing every available byte of memory, or when developing add-ins for it. During day-to-day work, I always want it on and minimized. The problem is that there's no easy keyboard shortcut to minimize Outlook like there is to close it - I don't like the two-step shortcut of Alt+Space - n , and I don't want to define a new non...

Screencasts vs. Whitepapers

A few weeks ago, Lawrence Liu (a senior technical PM and community lead for Sharepoint at Microsoft) linked to a few screencasts for learning how to use various features in MOSS2007. In that entry, he mentioned how screecasts are more effective and efficient in training and learning to use a new piece of software. Me, I'm a bit divided about them: 1) Screencasts are great for getting a hands-on view of the system, that's true. A picture is worth a thousand words, and a movie is worth about 30 frames...

Exposing add-in errors in VSTO for Word 2007

One of the most annoying things about writing add-ins for Office is that it tends to swallow any and all errors that occur. All exceptions are silently thrown into the trash heap without even a statusbar flag. Nothing. This meant that we often had to add messageboxes for debugging, or Debugger.Launch to see what's going on. At first I thought that Word 2007 was no different, but then I was idly browsing through the Word Options dialog and discovered a wonderful prize - a checkbox called "Show add...

VSTO for Outlook 2007 - Building the Add-in (part 2)

Writing the Outlook add-in described in my previous post was composed of the following steps: 1) Creating the project Ah, the wonders of VSTO. Saving us all the unnecessary hassle of adding COM references, implementing interfaces and working too hard. After installing VSTO 2005 SE we can create a new Outlook 2007 Add-in project that creates both the add-in project and the MSI Setup project that can be used to install it. 2) Building the Context Menu To add my own menu items to each item's Context...

VSTO for Outlook 2007 - New Features, More Fun (part 1)

Introduction Outlook has always been a bit of a latecomer to the VSTO game, being a step behind and a version later than Word and Excel. I'm glad to see that with Outlook 2007 and VSTO 2005SE it's gotten simpler and easier to write add-ins for it. So I did. The basic premise of this was an exercise to know more of the new Object Model enhancements in Outlook 2007, but it best serves as an example of a add-in for Outlook that uses the VSTO environment and the abilities of the new version. The Goal...