Miscellaneous Debris

Avner Kashtan's Frustrations and Exultations

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Preventing Outlook from closing with Alt-F4
I have come to the realization, at some point, that I never want to close Outlook. Really, there's no reason for me to shut it down except when doing something special, like freeing every available byte of memory, or when developing add-ins to it...

Posted Saturday, April 14, 2007 10:39 PM by Avner Kashtan | 4 comment(s)

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Exposing add-in errors in VSTO for Word 2007
One of the most annoying things about writing add-ins for Office is that it tends to swallow any and all errors that occur. All exceptions are silently thrown into the trash heap without even a statusbar flag. Nothing. This meant that we often had to...

Posted Sunday, January 21, 2007 6:10 PM by Avner Kashtan | 3 comment(s)

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VSTO for Outlook 2007 - Building the Add-in (part 2)
Writing the Outlook add-in described in my previous post was composed of the following steps: 1) Creating the project Ah, the wonders of VSTO. Saving us all the unnecessary hassle of adding COM references, implementing interfaces and working too hard...

Posted Wednesday, January 03, 2007 3:00 PM by Avner Kashtan | 13 comment(s)

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VSTO for Outlook 2007 - New Features, More Fun (part 1)
Introduction Outlook has always been a bit of a latecomer to the VSTO game, being a step behind and a version later than Word and Excel. I'm glad to see that with Outlook 2007 and VSTO 2005SE it's gotten simpler and easier to write add-ins for...

Posted Wednesday, January 03, 2007 2:59 PM by Avner Kashtan | with no comments

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DatePicker Blues.
I'm really surprised at how hard it is to find a good DateTimePicker control that meets all our requirements: 1) Must suppost null dates, like the Due Date datepicker in Outlook tasks. 2) Must be an ActiveX, and supported inside both .NET winforms and...

Posted Tuesday, August 09, 2005 6:31 PM by AvnerK | 7 comment(s)

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IBF Debugging
The hour is late, so I will be brief. If you want to debug an Office 2003 IBF solution, you must have C++ installed as part of your VS.NET 2003 installation. If you click on "Build Solution and Execute Action" and see the build succeed but nothing else...

Posted Tuesday, December 28, 2004 2:42 AM by AvnerK | with no comments

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The Joy of VSTO.
At last, I have a glowingly positive, happily cheerful and satisfyingly pleased entry instead of my usual rant. I installed the Whidbey Beta 1 build yesterday, and immediately started checking out the beta of VSTOv2. After the grief I went through with...

Posted Wednesday, July 07, 2004 1:33 AM by AvnerK | with no comments

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Office 2003's disappearing-reappearing PIAs.
Just in case someone else is running into this problem: If you're trying to install Office 2003 Professional and want to make sure you install the PIAs as well, you go to the setup components list and look for .NET Programmability Support and are surprised...

Posted Thursday, June 10, 2004 1:35 AM by AvnerK | with no comments

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Word and Excel - A Wor(l)d Apart
Technically, the same smart document can apply to both Word and Excel. In practice, if you want your smart-doc to actually DO something, chance are half your code will be hacked and kludged to work for both. For example: The XML model is different for...

Posted Tuesday, April 13, 2004 2:23 PM by AvnerK | 2 comment(s)

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Debug and Conquer!
A few tips to keep in mind when developing and debugging a Smart Document using C# (and probably VB.NET too). (For my own selfish ease-of-use, I will refer to Word exclusively here. All these steps should apply to Excel equally). When building the Smart...

Posted Thursday, April 08, 2004 7:28 PM by AvnerK | with no comments

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