Outlook 2007 Developer Reference updated on MSDN!
The Outlook 2007 Developer Reference has been updated on MSDN on November 13, 2007! This Reference contains conceptual, reference, and programming task topics, guiding developers to program Outlook using the Outlook Object Model. This is the first update to the Reference on MSDN in ten months since January. Over the last ten months, more than fifty improvements and fixes involving hundreds of topics have been applied to this set of documentation. The following are some of the areas of improvement:
- Search and Filter – Clarified certain concepts about DASL and Jet queries, added new code snippets and programming task topics, including Filtering Items Using a String Comparison, How to: Search the Calendar for Appointments Within a Date Range that Contain a Specific Word in the Subject, and How to: Search the Calendar for Appointments that Occur Partially or Entirely in a Given Time Period,
- Enumerating, Searching, and Filtering Items in a Folder - Clarified how to obtain a writeable object from a row in a Table that supports read-write operations.
- AdvancedSearch method of the Application object – Clarified the limit of simultaneous searches.
- Address Book – Added a new programming task topic How to: Map a Display Name to an E-mail Address.
- Items, Folders, and Stores – Added a new programming task topic How to: Delete All Items and Subfolders in the Deleted Items Folder.
- NewMailEx event of the Application object – Added precautions to take when obtaining the Entry ID of the new item.
- OlUserPropertyType enumeration – Supplemented the constants in the OlUserPropertyType enumeration with corresponding MAPI type values. For example, the constant olDateTime maps to the MAPI type PT_SYSTIME.
- Automating Outlook from a Visual Basic Application – Clarified the security reason for a VBA application to use the trusted Application object intrinsic to the environment, except when the application intends to automate a separate instance of Outlook. All code samples in the Reference have been scrubbed to reinforce this concept.
I would like to thank Outlook MVP, Sue Mosher, who over the last year helped us improve our documentation by going through a large volume of the topics in the Outlook 2007 Developer Reference and giving us valuable feedback.
In case you are wondering, ten months seem to be a long time to wait for an update, the client applications of 2007 Microsoft Office system are capable of continuously refreshing developer reference content through Help in the product when you select to search and obtain content on Office Online! Through this mechanism, all the improvements and fixes included in this update on MSDN were actually already pushed on Office Online within a day after the corresponding topics had been modified. If this sounds novel to you, stay tuned, I will talk more about this next time.