Maptitude is the ideal MapPoint alternative for developers

This is a guest post by Stewart Berry, Director of Product Management at Caliper Corporation, in which he introduces Maptitude - the software designed as direct replacement for Microsoft MapPoint... Read the rest of this entry →

Office 365 for developers – What, How, Where?

Office 365 is said to be the most strategic developer surface area for Microsoft in the near future. So, let's take a quick look at what Office 365 has to offer from the developer's perspective... Read the rest of this entry →

Add-in Express sim-ships with Visual Studio 2015 and Office 2016 Preview

I am happy to report good news to all Add-in Express users – we are one of the Microsoft partners to sim-ship our products together with the Visual Studio 2015 RC and Office 2016 Preview... Read the rest of this entry →

Graphics formats for Microsoft Office add-ins

In today's article, we'll explore the various graphic formats supported by MS Office components and how to make them appear the best they can be.... Read the rest of this entry →

Office context menu add-in for Excel, Outlook, Word, PowerPoint

The blog is about an add-in (with the source code) that adds a button to all context menus of Excel, Outlook, PowerPoint, Project, Publisher, Visio and Word in Office 2010-2013. The button shows the name of the context menu.... Read the rest of this entry →

Windows and Office security guide for Office developers

Office add-in security and certificates has always been somewhat of a daunting task. In today's article we'll first investigate code-signing certificates and why they are used. We'll then take a closer look at the Office Trust Center function and settings... Read the rest of this entry →

How to determine when a user has read an Outlook message

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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 →

Office Newswire :: APIs, APIs, APIs!

Bill Gates has said over and over that Office is development platform, and he has always been correct. But, as technology has progressed, Office has remained largely the same (as a desktop productivity suite and a development platform). Sure, the Office team has embraced the web with the Office web apps and the Apps for Office model. But, they were tied to a Windows first strategy... Read the rest of this entry →

Connecting Outlook appointments with Freshbooks web-service data, part 4

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 →

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