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Outlook Add-in : What is a COM Add-in? What You Need to Create a COM Add-in?

  • 05/12/2008

What is a COM Add-in?

COM add-ins are a feature in Microsoft Office and are supported by all Office programs, including Outlook.

Key benefits of COM add-ins include:

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COM add-ins run in-process with the host program, so custom code generally runs faster than code implemented in Visual Basic for Applications.

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The basic COM add-in architecture is consistent across all Office programs, whereas in previous versions of Office, each program had its own add-in architecture.

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You can create one COM add-in to use with more than one Office program.

What You Need to Create a COM Add-in?

In addition to Outlook, you need one of the following development environments to create a COM add-in for Office or Outlook:

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Visual Basic 5.0 or later (Visual Basic 6.0 is preferred)

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Microsoft Office Developer, which includes the ability to compile a Visual Basic for Applications project into a Dynamic Link Library (DLL)

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Any other COM-compliant development environment, such as Microsoft C++ or Microsoft J++

Comments

  • Anonymous
    May 12, 2008
    PingBack from http://microsoft.wawblog.info/?p=19336

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2016
    In layans terms  please,  as the  above makes no sense to me

  • Anonymous
    January 21, 2016
    Could you describe this in laymans terms please. I've just had a message  on screen that says "Outlook detected a COM Add-in problem - we have disabled  it" What exactly  does this mean? What  action do I take?