‘Add-in Express for Office and .net’ category archive
How to determine when a user has read an Outlook message
Pieter van der Westhuizen | March 5th, 2015
In this article, we'll look at how to determine when a user has read an Outlook mail message. We will create an Outlook add-in that illustrates the various methods of responding to the the fact that a user has read an e-mail in Outlook... Read the rest of this entry →
Building and deploying a bit-specific Office add-in
Andrei Smolin | February 25th, 2015
Add-in Express is essentially bitness-neutral. The downside is: creating a pure 64bit add-in isn't directly supported. When you invoke the Register Add-in Express Project command in Visual Studio, Add-in Express shows a message suggesting that you use the Any CPU platform instead. Below I describe how to work around this... Read the rest of this entry →
Working with Outlook HTMLBody – a guide for Office developers
Pieter van der Westhuizen | February 23rd, 2015
If you've ever tried to design an attractive and somewhat complex e-mail message using Microsoft Outlook and HTML, chances are you very quickly realized that the Outlook mail message body format performs rather differently than a normal web browser... Read the rest of this entry →
How to implement auto-update for Office add-ins
Pieter van der Westhuizen | February 12th, 2015
Automatic updates for software applications' mobile apps have become an everyday occurrence for most users. For a user it provides a level of comfort to know that their software is always up to date with the latest and greatest version. It could also be a source of irritation for many users depending on the frequency of updates – not many users would be happy upgrading to a new version every day... Read the rest of this entry →
How to get unread mail in Outlook: C# code examples
Pieter van der Westhuizen | January 29th, 2015
Finding and filtering items in Outlook can be done in a variety of ways and in this article we'll focus on ways to retrieve unread mail from Outlook... Read the rest of this entry →
Working with Outlook attachments programmatically: C# code examples
Pieter van der Westhuizen | January 23rd, 2015
Many Outlook developers have been faced with programmatically accessing and working with Outlook Item attachments. All Outlook items have the Attachments property, which means attachments can be added to MailItem, ContactItem and AppointmentItem items, to name a few. In this article we'll explore some facets of handling and interacting with attachments in Outlook... Read the rest of this entry →
Sending and updating Outlook Calendar’s appointments and meeting requests
Pieter van der Westhuizen | January 16th, 2015
2015 is here, and from all of us at Add-in Express we wish you a very prosperous year. We'll kick off this year by taking a closer look at Microsoft Outlook appointments and meetings... Read the rest of this entry →
How to access Outlook from HTML and JavaScript based add-ins
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 26th, 2014
When Microsoft announced their new Office development platform, which would allow developers to create MS Office Apps using HTML and JavaScript, I was very excited about the idea. Unfortunately, I quickly learned that I simply could not accomplish the same things I can with the standard Office Object Model than with the new Office JavaScript object model... Read the rest of this entry →
Connecting Outlook appointments with Freshbooks web-service data, part 4
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 14th, 2014
In this, our fourth and final part on how to write an Outlook add-in for Freshbooks web-service, we'll explore how to develop a custom form region to connect an Outlook appointment with the web-service's Timesheet entry... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating Outlook ribbon UI from scratch – Integrating with Freshbooks web-service, part 3
Pieter van der Westhuizen | November 6th, 2014
In this article, we'll continue with the add-in and tackle the process of hiding the standard Outlook Inspector and Explorer Ribbon tabs for the Freshbooks folders and items and replacing them with our own Freshbooks Ribbon Tabs... Read the rest of this entry →
Calling Freshbooks web-service from Outlook, part 2
Pieter van der Westhuizen | October 21st, 2014
In the previous article, we started with the basic concept and layout of our Freshbooks Outlook Add-in. So far, we've connected Outlook to the web-service by creating the Freshbooks specific folders, message classes and solution module, and in this article we'll continue building our Outlook plug-in... Read the rest of this entry →
How to integrate Outlook add-in with Freshbooks web-service, part 1
Pieter van der Westhuizen | October 6th, 2014
In this article, the first of a series, we'll start building a Microsoft Outlook Add-in that will serve as a client for Freshbooks. Users would be able to view their Freshbooks data as well as perform numerous Freshbooks tasks all from within Outlook... Read the rest of this entry →
Creating an Excel Stock Information RTD server using the Yahoo Finance API
Pieter van der Westhuizen | September 25th, 2014
In today's article, we'll write an Excel RTD server that returns the latest stock prices and other information. In case you're not familiar with Excel RTD servers, it is used to communicate with a real-time data source, such as stock quotes and provide the user with a constant flow of changing data... Read the rest of this entry →
Using Outlook Recipient and Recipients collection – guide for developers
Ty Anderson | September 18th, 2014
Writing email can get you in a lot of trouble if you are not paying attention. I can tell you about some seriously funny (on retrospect) situations caused when I inadvertently added a recipient that I did not intend to add. I can tell you but I won't (unless we meet in person and you buy me a beer). Let's just say that Outlook's autofill feature is not your friend and is not to be trusted... Read the rest of this entry →
Calling Yahoo Weather web-service from an Outlook add-in
Pieter van der Westhuizen | August 21st, 2014
It's been a while since my last blog post and today we start the first in a series of exciting blog posts on integrating Microsoft Office applications with web-based services. The web is growing bigger and bigger by the day and there are a wide range of applications and services available on the internet which you can use to provide your users with more features and functionality inside Microsoft Outlook.... Read the rest of this entry →
Outlook Address Book – complete guide for developers
Ty Anderson | August 1st, 2014
Out-of-the-box, Outlook'is address book is the default contacts folder that resides in a user's Outlook folder structure. In a typical Outlook installation, there is a single contacts folder and feeds the TO, CC, BCC fields in the Outlook email form. In any form that supports assigning a contact to it, the default address book feeds it as well... Read the rest of this entry →