Novel way to handle Outlook 2010 Fast Shutdown

In order to understand how Outlook’s Fast Shutdown mechanism affects your Outlook Add-ins, I have made a utility to test and demonstrate Outlook 2010 fast shutdown mechanism and an example Outlook Add-in.

Fast Shutdown Utility

The Fast Shutdown Exercise Machine Utility “FSU” is a tray-area application written in Delphi 2009 (Unicode) with best practices. It loads and saves into \Application Data\ or \AppData\ location in your user account using XML instead of Registry or INI files.

Tab 1 Global: This controls global startup settings. FSU detects both 32-bits and 64-bits Outlook. It reads and writes both 32-bit and 64-bit registry locations.

You can select from four different shutdown options: Enabled, Opt-in, Disabled and Default. This corresponds to [Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Options\Shutdown\FastShutdownBehavior:DWORD] entry in the Windows Registry.

Tab 2 Individual Add-ins: Inclusive of global settings, you can select Enable Shutdown Notification for all Add-ins or default settings, along with individual settings for each Add-in.

Tab 3 Utility: In order to simulate more annoying Outlook and Word situations, there is ability to kill Outlook processes in memory, make Outlook hidden, make Word sessions hidden and kill Word processes in memory.

Tab 4: About is the About page. This tab contains the copyright notice and link to this article.

Outlook Add-in example

I've developed an example Outlook Add-in to get ready for Outlook 2010 and discovered a novel way to handle Outlook Fast Shutdown 2010.

The software used to develop this Add-in and additional components are:

• Delphi 2009/2010
• Add-in Express for Office and Delphi

64-bit, 32-bit registry on Windows 7, Windows 2008 Server

Using Delphi 2009 / Delphi 2010 we use the function OutlookVersion64 to detect if 64-bit Outlook is installed or else use OutlookVersion to find the Outlook version

function OutlookVersion64: string;
var
  sVer, sTmp: string;
const
  sOutlookDefault = 'Not Installed';
  sOutlook14 = 'Outlook.Application.14'; // first 64-bit version
begin
  sVer := sOutlookDefault;
  with TRegistry.Create() do
    try
      // 64-bit Outlook
      Access := KEY_WOW64_64KEY or KEY_READ;
      RootKey := HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT;
      if OpenKey('Outlook.Application.14', false) then
      begin
        sVer := sOutlook14;
      end;
    finally
      free
    end;
  Result := sVer;
end;

Note the usage of KEY_READ to allow read-only access to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT (required when the user is not an Administrator) and KEY_WOW64_64KEY to access 64-bit portions of Windows Registry.

//Detects Outlook version for 32-bit Machines
function OutlookVersion: string;
var
  sVer, sTmp: string;
  reg: TRegistry;
const
  sOutlookDefault = 'Not Installed';
  sOutlook14 = 'Outlook.Application.14';
  sOutlook12 = 'Outlook.Application.12';
  sOutlook11 = 'Outlook.Application.11';
  sOutlook10 = 'Outlook.Application.10';
  sOutlook9 = 'Outlook.Application.9';
  sOutlook8 = 'Outlook.Application.8';
begin
  sVer := sOutlookDefault;
  reg := TRegistry.Create(KEY_READ);
  reg.RootKey := HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT;
  if reg.OpenKey('Outlook.Application\CurVer\', false) then
  begin
    sTmp := reg.ReadString('');
    if sTmp = sOutlook14 then
      sVer := sOutlook14
    else if sTmp = sOutlook12 then
      sVer := sOutlook12
    else if sTmp = sOutlook11 then
      sVer := sOutlook11
    else if sTmp = sOutlook10 then
      sVer := sOutlook10
    else if sTmp = sOutlook9 then
      sVer := sOutlook9
    else if sTmp = sOutlook8 then
      sVer := sOutlook8;
  end;
  reg.free;
  Result := sVer;
end;

Novel method to alleviate Fast Startup issue

When should I use OnShutDown and OnDisconnect?
OnShutDown, the toolbars, certain registry values are present. Thus, if you wrote your own toolbar customizations and need to save those values to registry, you should use OnShutDown. When you close your own final settings (e.g., the database connection, freeing custom objects in your own list) you should use OnDisconnect.

The flowchart for pre-Outlook 2010 is:

You write your code in OnShutDown/OnBeginShutDown (1) and OnDisconnect/OnAddinFinalize (3).

With Outlook 2010 it is:

Refactoring steps are:

1. You would place an event sink to capture the OnQuit event from Outlook and start Shutdown processing.
   There is a semaphore to guard against Shutdown twice.
2. Since OnShutDown is called, if the semaphore is not set, it will call the Shutdown code.

This code change handles every situation:

Code

The interface code is:

TAddInModule = class(TadxCOMAddInModule)
    dataconn: TADOConnection;
    adxOutlookAppEvents1: TadxOutlookAppEvents;
    procedure adxCOMAddInModuleCreate(Sender: TObject);
    procedure adxOutlookAppEvents1Quit(Sender: TObject);
    procedure adxCOMAddInModuleAddInBeginShutdown(Sender: TObject);
    procedure adxCOMAddInModuleAddInFinalize(Sender: TObject);
  private
  protected
  public
    bFastShutdown: Boolean; // Semaphore
    procedure MergedClose;
  end;

The implementation code is:

procedure TAddInModule.adxCOMAddInModuleCreate(Sender: TObject);
begin
  bFastShutdown := false; // Initialize Fast Shutdown to false
end; 
 
procedure TAddInModule.adxCOMAddInModuleAddInBeginShutdown(Sender: TObject);
begin
  MergedClose; // Call new procedure instead
end; 
 
procedure TAddInModule.adxCOMAddInModuleAddInFinalize(Sender: TObject);
begin
  //Nothing to do
end; 
 
procedure TAddInModule.adxOutlookAppEvents1Quit(Sender: TObject);
begin
  MergedClose; // Call new procedure instead
end; 
 
procedure TAddInModule.MergedClose;
begin
  if bFastShutdown then  // Semaphore to prevent Shutdown called twice.
    Exit;
  bFastShutDown := true;
  // Save toolbars
  // Free any memory
  // Close any pending database connection (if file-based)
end;

References:

¹Icons were used from https://www.wpclipart.com/ (public domain license)

Available downloads:

Fast Shutdown Utility
Sample Outlook add-in

You may also be interested in:

Outlook Fast Shutdown: under the yellow hood
Outlook 2010 Fast Shutdown feature