How to debug an Outlook Social Provider

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To debug a provider, create a DebugProviders value of type DWORD in the Windows registry under the SocialConnector key (shown on the following line), and set the DebugProviders value to 1.

HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\SocialConnector

By default, provider debugging is not turned on. If the DebugProviders value is not present, or it is present and set to a value of 0, provider debugging is turned off.

If the DebugProviders value is set to 1, an alert dialog box is displayed with verbose error information when an error occurs. Setting the DebugProviders value to 1 also causes validation of provider XML against the schema for OSC provider extensibility, OutlookSocialProvider.xsd. The effect of this registration key is global—the debug alert appears for all loaded providers instead of for a specific provider.

To display command bar buttons that can help you debug a provider, create a ShowDebugButtons value of type DWORD in the Windows registry under the SocialConnector key, and set the ShowDebugButtons value to 1. To hide the debug command bar buttons, set the ShowDebugButtons value to 0.

For Outlook 2010, the debug command bar buttons appear on the Add-ins tab of the explorer ribbon. For Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2003, the debug command bar buttons appear on the standard command bar of the Outlook explorer window.

The following table shows the provider debug commands.

Command	Function
Sync Feeds	Causes the OSC to ask the provider for cached activities only.
Sync Contacts	Causes the OSC to ask the provider for cached contacts only.
GAL Sync	Causes the OSC to populate data from the Microsoft Exchange Global Address List to Outlook contacts.
Clear AFI Cache	Clears the in-memory activity cache.
Clear Contact Cache	Clears the in-memory contact cache.
Invalidate Category Cache	Causes the OSC to reload the category list for each store when the activity feed is refreshed.