Professional Outlook 2007 Programming (Programmer to Programmer) (Paperback)

by Ken Slovak (Author)
Key Phrases: outlook forms, navigation pane, exchange public folders, Nothing Set, Task Management System Listing, Private Sub (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

• Written by one of the most popular and knowledgeable Microsoft Outlook MVPs, this book fills a void in the market for a professional-level Outlook programming book
• Explains how to use the many new features of Outlook 2007's object model and offers honest advice from the author on how to deal with common shortcomings and pitfalls of Outlook
• Addresses common workarounds for Outlook programming bugs and how to interface with Word, Excel, SharePoint, and Access
• Discusses the new Object Model, Outlook forms, COM add-ins, security, and more

From the Back Cover
Professional Outlook 2007 Programming

Written by one of the most popular and knowledgeable Microsoft Outlook MVPs, this book emphasizes the many new and exciting Outlook 2007 programming features. Ken Slovak shows you all you need to know to develop everything from Outlook custom forms and personal productivity macros to advanced COM add-ins that use a range of Microsoft technologies.

The Outlook 2007 model fulfills many of the requests that Outlook developers have been making for years. You'll see how many of the programming properties that are considered vital, but were previously unavailable in older versions of Outlook, now exist. Real-world examples show you how to solve common Outlook programming problems. Plus, you'll learn common workarounds for Outlook programming bugs. You'll quickly discover why you'll rarely if ever have to leave the Outlook object model to do what you want with your code when using Outlook 2007.

What you will learn from this book

• Various properties, methods, and events in the new unified Outlook model

• How to customize the Outlook user interface

• Ways the interface works with other applications

• How to use VSTO 2005 V3

• How a task management system can utilize the new To-Do bar

Who this book is for

This book is for professional or advanced developers who want to take full advantage of the power of the unified Outlook object model in Outlook 2007, and who want to learn the important new features in the unified object model. Existing knowledge of Outlook programming is not required.

Wrox Professional guides are planned and written by working programmers to meet the real-world needs of programmers, developers, and IT professionals. Focused and relevant, they address the issues technology professionals face every day. They provide examples, practical solutions, and expert education in new technologies, all designed to help programmers do a better job.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 454 pages
• Publisher: Wrox (October 8, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0470049944
• ISBN-13: 978-0470049945
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 2.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #589,302 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars Outlook 2003 Add-In? No Luck, April 22, 2008

By	Joshua Jacobsen "[e-mail]" (Plano, TX United States) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I had a specific goal in mind when I wrote this book -- to produce a plugin for Microsoft Outlook 2003 (and 2007 in the future) that adds a tab to a calendar item. This tab provides integration with scheduling software for meeting rooms. (not my idea, but not my choice, either).

This book covers a lot of topics that I didn't bother to read, and this review won't be relevent to users who want to learn about VBA and Outlook forms.

The quick summary of what I read is "Microsoft provided feeble interfaces for plugin development, and you have to recreate tons of stuff from scratch. I've done that for you, and here is 50KB worth of code to copy-and-paste into your project."

After typing up a significant part of it over two days, I realized that I had made too many typos to troubleshoot, and I also decided that I didn't really care about all of this minutiae, anymore. So I went to the author's website and downloading the huge blocks of cookie-cutter code that are required to make a plugin of any sort, and just read through the end. However, his sample doesn't compile in Visual Studio 2005, regardless of what I do to try and fix it.

Let's go over how badly this sucks. There is simply no way that you could ever take the code from the book and construst anything resembling the project file which I later downloaded from the author's website. Far too much of the object structure, file structure, references, and namespace declarations were omitted in the book, without so much as a word about it. The code involved is big, and kinda abstract. It's unclear what you need to change to achieve certain results. The example provided might have barely been sufficient to guide me toward my task, to begin with. However, since this one example didn't compile, I was totally stranded.

The architecture of the Outlook plugin is not really explained, although there are "tactical" references to it, sprinkled across a 100 page span that describes bits of code. The object model summary at the end of the book looks basically like a plain text file printed sideways, and offers no "summary" at all, just basically a poorly formatted list of objects, methods and properties.

Now, I can't fully blame the author for providing insights (which must have been painfully learned) into Microsoft Outlook, which just doesn't "want to be modified." However, I'm not inclined to praise the author, either. The parts of the book that I read (about half of it) looked like it was churned out as quickly as the author was able -- maybe a basic narration about bits of code from a single relevent project.

Overall, this is the sub-sufficient level of documentation that seems way too common for the Wrox brand. I would have steered clear, since Wrox always fails me, but there weren't many choices for Plugin Development. I guess I'll blow some more of my company's training budget on the other books, since the Web doesn't really cover this topic, either.

4.0 out of 5 stars Good book on a Subject Not Well Documented, January 28, 2009

By	Brian Mains - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Working with Office product's API's can be a daunting task for several reasons. First, the API isn't always fully documented, and there can be a lot of gotchas for developers to find as they build an add-in for this popular software product. The author of Professional Outlook 2007 by Wrox has a lot of experience working with the Outlook API, as it's clearly visible with his writing style. He has a lot of knowledge that any Outlook developer needs to finish the job, plus includes several examples on each topic and includes his own helper code to work with the API.
Professional Outlook 2007 covers the several options for deploying add-ins. It starts out by walking through the creation of a macro using VBA. Macro's can be setup by using the inline macro designer by selecting the Tools > Forms > Design a Form. The designer support allows a developer to drag/drop fields onto the form and create a customized interface. Ken also discusses the options related to using Outlook Form Regions, a new feature only available in Outlook 2007. A form region embeds an icon in the Office ribbon so the user can activate the region (for certain region settings). While this is a nice option and separates the add-in from the actual form, the challenges are backward compatibility (as this feature isn't in Outlook 2003). Throughout the book, the book covers as many possible development options as there are with Office 2007, which are macros, COM add-ins, and VSTO, and across the various syntaxes and query mechanisms (like DASL) that are available.
Ken's book is filled with the gotchas (some times I debated as to whether the Outlook integration was even worth the hassle because of some of the many problems like random crashing, security issues, etc.) of Outlook development that every developer has to be aware of. He includes an entire chapter focused on the idea of real-world programming with Outlook 2007.
I think Ken does a good job of getting his point across, but in some areas the subject can come off dry; he includes his own personal source code that he reuses across projects. While helpful, I felt it was a distraction from the book a little bit. But overall, the book was great and I'd recommend it personally. Like all good books, this book wrapped up with a sample program that's always beneficial.