In general, you can have IE add-ons interact with standalone applications by using Windows messages and the Shared (static in C#) GetModulesByTypeName method of the AddinExpress.IE.ADXIEModule class. There is just one limitation: both processes (IE with your add-on and standalone application) must be running in the same Integrity Level. Read the rest of this entry
Nearly every software has some settings. An Internet Explorer plug-in is not an exception. The IE plug-in settings can be stored either in a file or in a registry branch, all is simple and transparent about this. But how to ensure the settings synchronization for all active instances of the IE plug-in in all running Internet Explorer processes? Read the rest of this entry
The Protected Mode feature was introduced in Internet Explorer 7 and continues to exist in Internet Explorer 8. Nearly at the same time when the Protected Mode feature appeared Microsoft introduced Protected Mode API for developers to use this feature. All API functions are implemented in the Add-in Express for Internet Explorer and .net product and today we are going to look into their capabilities... Read the rest of this entry
In one of my previous HowTo samples I showed you how to use the Microsoft Word Object Model capabilities for spell checking. Today we will look at one more ability of Microsoft Word, namely the capabilities of its dictionary, more specifically synonyms and antonyms. We will need the SynonymInfo object and SynonymList and AntonymList properties... Read the rest of this entry
The description of the ItemAdd event is laconic and compact - "Occurs when one or more items are added to the specified collection. This event does not run when a large number of items are added to the folder at once." But what is really implied by the words "a large number of items"? Read the rest of this entry
It would be true to say "get" rather than "convert". There could be only one right way – to use Extended MAPI. Another method is described in the MSDN article: How to retrieve alternate e-mail addresses by using CDO, but we will not see into this approach, because CDO is optional in Outlook 2003 and is absent completely in Outlook 2007. Read the rest of this entry
In Office 2007 there are 3 available color schemes – Black, Blue and Silver. The background of controls in command bars and ribbon tabs is changed by Office automatically. Do you want to try changing the background of your Outlook forms and Excel task panes when the MS Office color scheme is changed? Read the rest of this entry
Strange things mentioned in my previous post continue to happen. To the bug successfully fixed in the Office Live Add-in on Excel 2007, there's added a nasty and so far no-solution problem with the same add-in, this time on Word 2003... Read the rest of this entry
Strange things started happening around us. Pig flu added to the global economic crisis, and we have problems with Office 2007 and the Office Live Add-in added to our pre-release testing for compatibility with the recently released Office Service Pack 2. The fact of the matter is that... Read the rest of this entry
When Outlook is closing, Add-in Express saves the state of all regions embedded into Outlook, namely their position (if drag-and-drop is turned on), state (regions can be minimized or entirely hidden) and size (if resizing is allowed). We implemented this feature just to give end-users the utmost comfort when working with Outlook regions... Read the rest of this entry
In version 2009 of Add-in Express, a new property appears - RestoreFromMinimizedState. Now I will show you its behavior. Let's say, we have a minimized by default region... Read the rest of this entry
Add-in Express 2008 allows placing several forms into one Outlook region or task pane. In addition, Add-in Express 2009 enables the end-user to drag and drop custom forms to wherever they want to (naturally, with the developer's permission). Do you need to know where your form is now and in what state? Of course, you do… Read the rest of this entry
Part 2 of the Advanced Outlook Regions series, which focused on Outlook Explorer and Inspector regions, ended with the promise that there would be no pictures in the upcoming post, instead it would touch on rather unobvious, rarely used, but highly interesting stuff. Well, the first thing that I'd like to start with is cached instancing... Read the rest of this entry
It is generally known that the Microsoft Office Object Model is not thread safe and accessing some object, property or method not from the main thread may sometimes result in a host application crash. Of course, nothing prevents you from using threads inside the add-in itself, threads that don't need the Office Object Model... Read the rest of this entry
My previous post was about what the Advanced Outlook Regions really are. And now I will show you all possible regions for two main Outlook windows - Explorers and Inspectors. In this post there are a lot of pictures and little text. As usually, all the forms that I am going to demonstrate do not have a single control... Read the rest of this entry
Our web-site somehow absolutely imperceptibly for me turned into a collection of pages containing a bit outdated information about our products. I think we will spend the whole year 2009 on putting our web-site in order. In the meantime, I am going to systematically publish complete reviews of one or other of the capabilities that, in my opinion, are covered insufficiently or their descriptions are outdated. And I will start with perhaps the most popular feature of Add-in Express - the Advanced Outlook View and Form Regions... Read the rest of this entry
