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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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Screencasts vs. Whitepapers
A few weeks ago, Lawrence Liu (a senior technical PM and community lead for Sharepoint at Microsoft) linked to a few screencasts for learning how to use various features in MOSS2007. In that entry, he mentioned how screecasts are more effective and efficient...

Posted Thursday, February 15, 2007 4:10 PM by Avner Kashtan | 3 comment(s)

Outlook Calendar as your Windows Desktop
In a Channel 9 conversation, user Dr. Herbie expressed his long-standing desire to see his Outlook calendar as a desktop wallpaper. This, I admit, has never once occured to me. The nice thing about it is that it's so amazingly simple to implement...

Posted Thursday, February 01, 2007 4:29 PM by Avner Kashtan | 5 comment(s)

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 | 12 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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File Properties in Word 2007
A client asked me the other day what happened to File->Properties in Word 2007. They simply couldn't find it. In the Beta1 TR, I remember it was confusingly located on the Status Bar (!) – right-click, pick View and View Properties. Very...

Posted Wednesday, July 12, 2006 12:13 PM by AvnerK | 7 comment(s)

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Outlook Miscellany: Erasing a name from the Autocomplete Cache
The drop-down list of names that Outlook gives us to auto-complete a name or address being written is stored in a file called <ProfileName>.NK2 in our Application Data\Microsoft\Outlook directory. This file is stored in a proprietary binary format...

Posted Monday, November 14, 2005 9:35 AM by AvnerK | 4 comment(s)

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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