I've been doing an add-in for Outlook 2007 during my spare time, since Office 2007 and VSTO 2 SE was released. The add-in is supposed to help me to have control over how I spend my time and ease my administration.
We use Excel templates for monthly time sheets, travel expenses and some other internal administrative things. Even though the output is important (don't want to do them by hand), it's not the focus of my upcoming posts about the add-in, but rather the input is. The output could just as easily be to a web service, database or something else.
I did my first add-in (with the same purpose) about 8 or 9 years ago and I can't even remember for which Outlook version it was. During this time, programming Outlook, has become a lot easier and more powerful, and Microsoft is really starting to get somewhere with this. Outlook has always been harder to use as a developer, than for example Excel and Word, since the object model has been limited and still are in some areas, but much improved now.
Techniques that I've used with my add-in includes custom property page, form regions, Team System integration and task pane. Form regions is "the" thing that has made the biggest difference and it is very powerful. The biggest obstacle I've had is a confirmed bug, that
CalendarView.DisplayedDates always returns an empty array. I hope this will be corrected in SP1.
Stay tuned for more details on Outlook add-in programming.