Blogs @ IRM

I’ve been telling people this for years and years, and still I stepped right into the mudhole a month ago. I blame stress, but still I shouldn’t have. It’s so easy to just add the interop assemblies and off you go… until you try running your stuff on the 2008 r2 server, hosted somewhere else, with just enough user rights. And even though I managed ...

In an add-in for Outlook that I’m developing I wanted to show the built in Color Categories dialog so that the user could choose categories in a familiar way. The categories should be set on an object that is unique for the add-in (aka not for a mail or calendar item). I couldn’t find any way to show the dialog itself and when searching Internet I ...

When using ClickOnce for distributing an Office Add-in the default configuration is to check for updates every 7 days. In an add-in I built I have situations where the add-in must be up to date (for example when changing the WCF service interface). In this post I will show how I solved it. To check for existing updates I use the regularly ...

Three years ago (can’t believe it’s been so long) I blogged about creating an Outlook add-in. The add-in was developed with VSTO 2, but now I thought it was time to upgrade it to VSTO 3 and try out the ClickOnce deployment. If I was impressed about how easy and much better it had become to develop for Outlook 2007 with VSTO 2, I must say that the ...

Silverlight Silverlight 2.0 has today been downloaded about 100 miljon times and the upgrade process has just started. It will be possible to run Ssilverlight out of the browser and not only in the browser as today. There will be a Silverlight toolkit containing: Charting TreeView DockPanel WrapPanel ViewBox Expander ...

This video has been around for a few months now, but it's still cool. It's not one of Bill's better demos as he's kind of standing in the way of the screen all the time, but it still shows off the Touch Wall/Surface capabilities pretty well. I'm sure we'll see something like this in class rooms and larger meeting rooms in the future. It's easy to ...

I must be daft, I completely missed this free add-in from Microsoft to be able to save as PDF (and XPS) for Office 2007. It's been around for years... duh. This download allows you to export and save to the PDF and XPS formats in eight 2007 Microsoft Office programs. It also allows you to send as e-mail attachment in the PDF and XPS formats in ...

And now to something completely different... the Excel automation. Every now and then you need to open up an Excel file and do stuff with it. In this case we needed to create and read from named ranges in Excel, and it's not overy easy to get information about how to do that, so I thought I might as well post some sample code here. To get ...

TechEd keynote this year is presented by S. Somasegar (Corporate Vice President of the Developer Division, Microsoft) and we've got some great seating not far from the stage (super early bid benefit).   Announcment: Microsoft Sync Framework CTPSoftware + Services Blueprints from pattern & practices Visual Studio 2008 and .Net Framework 3.5 ...

I always gets redrawing issues with Outlook 2007 when I've used my Vista laptop after a week or so. The thing is that Outlook stops updating the screen and/or views are drawn incorrectly or incomplete. Ryan now confirms this issues in his post Outlook 2007 GDI Leak Hotfix, which also links to the fix in knowledge base article 932406.

So far, all my Outlook add-in posts have covered different aspects of gathering data from the user. It would also be nice if the user could get some nice presentation of this data, making it worthwhile putting it in. For this I have chosen to implement a custom task pane, that I have added and only displays when the calendar is active.     The ...

My previous post started to explore the possibility to add form regions to the built-in Outlook forms and this post will continue where I left off.     Handling the State of the Form Region For the fields in the form region to do anything useful we need to hook up some code with the form region and its controls. For this purpose I have created a ...

[UPDATE 2008-01-16: Today I finally got some time to verify that the GetFormRegionManifest method gets called according to Andrews comment below. It is great that this have been fixed so that you are not dependent on any external files, but rather can embedd them as resources. Check Andrews post for details and steps.]   One of the best new ...

This post will continue my exploration of programming Outlook 2007, by showing how to get information from Team System Foundation Server (TFS). The idea is that in the option page (I bloged about it here) you set up projects that you want to keep track of your time for. At least some of these projects will also exists in TFS (if you use TFS), and ...

Last week I promised to blog a little about my experience to do an add-in for Outlook 2007. In this post I will show an example of how to add a property page to the Options dialog. The result looks something like this (in swedish): The first thing to do is to catch the OptionsPagesAdd event of the Application object. This event should be set up ...

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 ...

It's available since yesterday in case you missed it (http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/subscriptions/default.aspx).  

I think the time has come when we should stop produce reports in SQL Server Reporting Services, Crystal Reports and other reporting products. Now I believe is the right time for us as developers to start using Microsoft Office much more. With the soon upcoming second release of VSTO for Visual Studio 2005, many of the limitations is ...