PDC05 & Outlook

Are you attending PDC 05 next week?  I sure hope you are because it’s going to be an awesome event.  For Outlook developers on Thursday, we’ll be introducing publicly for the first time all of the new improvements we’ve made in the Outlook object model and extensibility platform during a presentation by Randy Byrne (OFF321 – “Outlook 12”: Developing Solutions Using the Consolidated Outlook Object Model).  If you haven't built your schedule already, login to the PDC Commnet and plan your week already.

During the presentation Randy will be showcasing three demo add-ins that really showcase some of the great new things that are possible for Outlook integration with Outlook 12.  I’m very excited about the event because it will be the first time the public gets a good look at what’s possible and hopefully will validate all the work we’ve been doing for countless months of product development. 

Because we have so much new work to present though, the time Randy has for demos may be a bit short.  If you’re interested in any of the nuts and bolts of how the demos were built or want to get a closer look at them, come find one of us in the Office and SharePoint lounges.  I can fire up the demos on my laptop and run through again.  There’s still some time for the lounges where neither Randy or I are scheduled to be present, but I’ll try to be in the lounges as much as I can be.  I’d love to hear what everyone is doing with the Outlook OM and what types of solutions are being built right now on top of the Outlook platform.

I also would strongly encourage Outlook developers to attend the sessions on the new Office user interface, OFF201 on Tuesday and OFF302 immediately after.  There are also several sessions mentioning Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO), which is the best way for writing managed add-ins for Outlook with Visual Studio 2005.  I hear there will even be a preview of VSTO v3 (as Eric Carter recently pointed out) which I recommend you check out as well.