Video HowTo: Customize Outlook Inspector in a VB.NET COM add-in
A couple of weeks ago I came across an interesting article on MSDN – Building a C++ Add-in for Outlook 2010. Aha, Outlook 2010, I need to scrutinize it when I have a spare minute, definitely I will find something remarkable there. This is what I thought when added a new task with the link to that article to my TODO list. Well, I’ve got a spare minute today…
At first, when looking through the article for some interesting code and parts of Ribbon xml I did not find anything out of the ordinary that would catch my eye. After reading it more carefully, I understood that it was just a trivial add-in with a single button. Hold on, why then is it 30 pages long?! Aha, there’s a good deal of code here! The first 13 pages describe the process of the add-in creation and adding a button, all the rest focus on building an Outlook Inspector region and working with it. Hem, and how much time will it take to develop such an add-in with Add-in Express, I wonder? And how much code will we have there? Let’s check it, shall we?
Well then, we are done in 9 minutes. We got all visual parts of the add-in as early as at the design-time stage, and there’s just a tiny piece of code there. Something tells me that I niggled with the article much longer than created the add-in itself :) …
This sample video was captured in Visual Studio 2008 (VB.NET) with Add-in Express 2009 for Office and .net.
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