HowTo: Work with threads in Microsoft Office COM add-ins

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 →

Complete review – Advanced Outlook Regions, part 2

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 →

Complete review – Advanced Outlook Regions, part 1

Our web-site somehow absolutely imperceptibly for me turned into a collection of pages containing a bit outdated information about our products.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reviews of one or other of the capabilities that, in my opinion, are covered insufficiently or their descriptions are outdated.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 →

HowTo: Customize Outlook Navigation Pane – C#, VB.NET

What is the Outlook Navigation pane? According to Microsoft, it is the column on the left side of the Outlook window that includes panes such as Shortcuts or Mail and the shortcuts or folders within each pane. The Navigation Pane was introduced in Outlook 2003 and enhanced in Outlook 2007. Let's see what a developer can do with the Navigation Pane... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express 2009 – Beta 2 download links

If your professional or premium subscription has not expired yet, or if you purchased Add-in Express after December 15, 2008, the upgrade is free for you. Otherwise, you can upgrade for 50% off the regular price... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express 2009 – Beta 2 what’s new and fixed

Yesterday, on the 2nd of April, we uploaded beta 2 of Add-in Express 2009. Please, do not confuse it with Add-in Express 2010, announced in the April, 1 newsletter. Today, let it be a serious talk :)... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express 2009 – Beta 2 drag-and-drop

It seems like after another new visual feature being added to Add-in Express 2009, our screenshots look more and more variegated. Scary variegated, I would say... Read the rest of this entry →

April 1st newsletter – Support for VisiCalc, WordStar, OpenOffice and ClosedOffice

Two days ago, that was April, 1, we sent out a newsletter (you certainly got it if you are on our mailing list) that didn't contain any valuable information at all, no features, no bug fixes, no enhancements. Just a couple of jokes and a few comments that I thought were funny enough to make our customers laugh. Why do I recur to that newsletter here and now? Because the feedback I received was just staggering!... Read the rest of this entry →

Converting existing Office COM add-in projects to Add-in Express

Last week I had a chance to check out how easy the conversion process is. A customer related about troubles he was having when trying to get his Outlook add-ins to work. Soon it became clear that this is yet another case of a VSTO add-in colliding with Microsoft Dynamics CRM Outlook add-in ...... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: Use the Microsoft Word Object Model capabilities for spell checking

The Microsoft Word Object Model contains a lot of capabilities that .NET developers can benefit from. While everybody knows about the abilities of Microsoft Word related to text formatting, few are aware of its rich capacity in the spell check area…... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: Get properties of an Outlook email item drag-and-dropped onto a .NET form

There is only one simple and reliable way to get a valid Outlook object when dragging Outlook items onto a .NET form of your Outlook add-in. Let's have a good look at this way by example of MailItem and an advanced Outlook form region...... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: Use the View.XML property to filter Outlook items

The View object itself is simple but it has one very powerful property. This property is called XML, it contains an xml definition of a folder view and today we are going to look at the capabilities of the filter element…... Read the rest of this entry →

HowTo: .NET controls in Internet Explorer – natural behavior and look-and-feel

As for the way .net controls behave in Internet Explorer, it’s Okay, Add-in Express will take care of it. As concerns their look-and-feel, we are going to scrutinize this issue closely today. Standard .NET controls look rather clumsy in Internet Explorer...... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express 2009 – Beta 1 Word and PowerPoint capabilities

Keeping up the development of Add-in Express most in-demand features, we tweaked the Advanced Task Panes for working on Microsoft PowerPoint and Word. Early in the morning today, I wrote the previous sentence, captured and pasted the above screenshot and realized that there is nothing more to write on this issue... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express 2009 – Beta 1 what’s fixed

As compared to the previous generation, Add-in Express 2009 doesn’t contain revolutionary changes or enhancements. We have not rewritten the core code completely, the major part of the time was spent on the most in-demand features, such as Outlook view and form regions and Excel, Word and PowerPoint task panes... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express 2009 – Beta 1 Excel capabilities

In addition to bug fixes, which I must admit were not too numerous, and some platform-dependent modifications and enhancements concerning Excel, we've decided to improve Advanced Excel Task Panes as well... Read the rest of this entry →

Have any questions? Ask us right now!