MVP Helmut Obertanner Published Outlook Articles and Sample Applications on MSDN
Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP), Helmut Obertanner*, published two articles on MSDN today:
Inspector Wrapper
An inspector in Microsoft Outlook is a window that displays an Outlook item. Because Outlook supports many different item types, for example, mail, contact, appointment, meeting, and task items, and fields of interest can differ significantly from one item type to another, displaying each of these different types of items requires item-specifc inspectors. An inspector wrapper allows you to independently handle Inspector objects for different Outlook item types. Using an inspector wrapper allows you to programmatically identify the window that the user clicked, and to get around the potential problem of losing click events that generally work for only a short period of time. An inspector wrapper can also manage memory cleanup properly. See Helmut's article on an inspector wrapper, and download the inspector wrapper sample application, in C# or Visual Basic, for more details.
Enforcing Business Rules
An Outlook inspector is a window that actually uses a specified form to display a particular type of Outlook item. When designing custom forms in Outlook, often one would like to be able to specify some intelligence in the form behavior. For example, in a custom contact form for a business supplier, one may want to establish a rule that one must have either a business telephone number or business address already specified in the form before the contact can be saved. The key to enabling the intelligence in a custom form is to handle each Outlook item individually using an inspector wrapper. Read Helmut's article on enforcing business rules that describes how to validate two fields in a contact form, and display a message box to the user if the fields don't validate. Download the sample application that enforces these business rules for further details.
*Helmut has expertise in Outlook and Microsoft Office development tools in Microsoft Visual Studio. Helmut maintains a professional site at www.outlooksharp.de.