While creating a Outlook application object from another process in C# like:

outlook = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application();

or powershell

PS> $outlook = new-object -com Outlook.Application

or straight up COM via CoCreateInstance on Vista it's possible to receive the following error:

Retrieving the COM class factory for component with CLSID {0006F03A-0000-0000-C000-000000000046} failed due to the following error: 80080005

Error 0x80080005 (CO_E_SERVER_EXEC_FAILURE) is sort of a generic COM error message that occurs for many reasons while calling CoCreateInstance. One reason someone could receive this error is because the client process and the server process (outlook.exe in this case) are running at different integrity levels. By default it doesn't appear that COM likes talking across two different processes that are running at different integrity levels. There supposedly is a way to implement the COM server in such a way to support it but currently the Outlook COM server doesn't support it.

People who develop their applications on Vista using Visual Studio, which runs at integrity level high by default, will run into this issue often when Outlook is already running. By default Outlook runs at integrity level medium and if the client application is run from Visual Studio it will inherit the high integrity level and thus there will be an integrity level mismatch.

To fix this one needs to make the integrity levels match so either start the client application outside Visual Studio at the normal medium integrity level or run Outlook at the high integrity level (i.e. as Administrator). However it is not recommended to run Outlook at integrity level high all the time. Another way to deal with this is to ensure Outlook is not already running so COM will start the process at the correct integrity level of the client process that created the application object.

I don't know of any way to detect this exact situation programmatically but process explorer works well for manually checking the integrity levels of processes.

Imagine we have some code in an Outlook addin that looks similar to code below. Does anyone see anything wrong with it? It simply places a button on the menu bar and shows a message box when the button is clicked. The code works for sometime but then all of a sudden the button mysteriously stops working. What gives? 

using Office = Microsoft.Office.Core;
using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
...

void SetupCommandBar(Outlook.Application application)
{
    Office.CommandBar menu = application.ActiveExplorer().CommandBars.ActiveMenuBar;

    Office.CommandBarButton button = menu.Controls.Add(Office.MsoControlType.msoControlButton,
        Type.Missing, Type.Missing, Type.Missing, true) as Office.CommandBarButton;

    button.Caption = "Click Me!";
    button.Click += new Office._CommandBarButtonEvents_ClickEventHandler(button_Click);
}

void button_Click(Microsoft.Office.Core.CommandBarButton Ctrl, ref bool CancelDefault)
{
    System.Windows.Forms.MessageBox.Show("Clicked Button!");
}

The button stops working due to the mystical powers of the .Net garbage collector. If we look closely we notice that the button object is locally scoped in the SetupCommandBar function, thus once we execute that function the button object is free to be cleaned up. However, until the button object is actually destroyed by the garbage collector the button click event will fire and the button will work. Due to the non-deterministic nature of the garbage collector we have no idea how long the button will work. In my simple testing it seemed to work for a little while but if you want to speed up the process add a call go GC.Collect in the button_Click callback.

The easiest fix for this problem is to change the scope of the button object to be a member variable of enclosing class. By doing this we ensure that the button object stays alive and works until we are ready for it to stop working.

After reading about Brad's find script I starting thinking about how cool it would be if I could highlight the search pattern in the output. So I wrote my own custom Find-String script to highlight the results.

Find-String.ps1

# Find-String.ps1
#  Wrapper around dir | select-string which will highlight the pattern in the results
param	( [string] $pattern = ""
	, [string] $filter = "*.*"
	, [switch] $recurse = $false
	, [switch] $caseSensitive = $false)

if ($pattern -eq $null -or $pattern -eq "") { Write-Error "Please provide a search pattern!" ; return }

$regexPattern = $pattern
if($caseSensitive -eq $false) { $regexPattern = "(?i)$regexPattern" }
$regex = New-Object System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex $regexPattern

# Write the line with the pattern highlighted in red
function Write-HostAndHighlightPattern([string]$inputText)
{
	$index = 0
	while($index -lt $inputText.Length)
	{
		$match = $regex.Match($inputText, $index)
		if($match.Success -and $match.Length -gt 0)
		{
			Write-Host $inputText.SubString($index, $match.Index   $index) -nonewline
			Write-Host $match.Value.ToString() -ForegroundColor Red -nonewline
			$index = $match.Index + $match.Length
		}
		else
		{
			Write-Host $inputText.SubString($index) -nonewline
			$index = $inputText.Length
		}
	}
}

# Do the actual find in the files
Get-ChildItem -recurse:$recurse -filter:$filter | 
	Select-String -caseSensitive:$caseSensitive -pattern:$pattern |	
	foreach {
		Write-Host "$($_.FileName)($($_.LineNumber)): " -nonewline
		Write-HostAndHighlightPattern $_.Line
		Write-Host
	}

Sample Output

PS> ./Find-String new-object
Find-String.ps1(13): $regex = New-Object System.Text.RegularExpressions.Regex $regexPattern
Get-ApptsUsingEWS.ps1(55): $responseXml = [xml](new-object System.IO.StreamReader $responseStream).ReadToEnd()
Get-ApptsUsingOOM.ps1(6): $outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application
getappts.ps1(51): $responseXml = [xml](new-object System.IO.StreamReader $responseStream).ReadToEnd()
printAppts.ps1(6): $outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application

For reference here are some other find scripts around the blogsphere: Brad Wilson, Ian Griffith and Keith Hill.

Before we dive into the code sample lets take a quick look at what it means for an appointment to fall into a given date range.

When you compare an appointment with a given date range (or any two time intervals) there are the 6 possible outcomes displayed in the diagram above. Usually as a first attempt people write a comparison that looks like:

[Start] >= RangeStart AND [End] <= RangeEnd

If you examine that comparison closely you will notice that it will only retrieve appointments of type 1. This maybe fine for most applications, like getting all appointments for a given week because there usually aren't any appointments spanning over the range edges. However, if you want to be more precise and include any appointments that overlap with a given date range (i.e. type 1, 2, 3, 4) you can use the following comparison:

[End] >= RangeStart AND [Start] <= RangeEnd

This type of restriction will help when you have smaller date/time ranges such as a few hours or a day. In general, unless you specifically only want type 1 appointments, I would recommend using this restriction which finds any appointments that overlap with the date/time range.

Since Walter has already provided a VBA, WebDAV, and CDO code sample on how to find appointments within a specific time frame, I figured I would provide some Powershell code samples.

Powershell script to retrieve appointments using the Outlook Object Model for a given date range.

Keep in mind in order to get all the appointments, including any instances of recurring appointments, you need to get the items collection on the calendar folder and then Sort by the "[Start]" property and set IncludeRecurrences to true. Once you have done this the Count property on the items collection is bogus because there could potentially be an infinite number of recurring appointments. So to traverse this collection you need to use the enumerator (i.e. foreach) or use the Find/FindNext methods on the collection.

# Get-ApptsUsingOOM.ps1
#    Powershell script to retrieve all appointments for a given date range using the Outlook Object Model
param ( [DateTime] $rangeStart = [DateTime]::Now
      , [DateTime] $rangeEnd   = [DateTime]::Now.AddDays(7))

$outlook = New-Object -ComObject Outlook.Application

# Ensure we are logged into a session
$session = $outlook.Session
$session.Logon()

$olFolderCalendar = 9
$apptItems = $session.GetDefaultFolder($olFolderCalendar).Items
$apptItems.Sort("[Start]")
$apptItems.IncludeRecurrences = $true

$restriction = "[End] >= '{0}' AND [Start] <= '{1}'" -f $rangeStart.ToString("g"), $rangeEnd.ToString("g")

foreach($appt in $apptItems.Restrict($restriction))
{
    "{0:MM/dd hh:mm tt} - {1:MM/dd hh:mm tt} : {2}" -f [DateTime]$appt.Start, [DateTime]$appt.End, $appt.Subject
}

$outlook = $session = $null;

Powershell script to retrieve appointments using Exchange Web Services for a given date range

For simplicity I built the soap message manually and submitted the request, but you could easily generate the web service proxy classes using wsdl.exe like I did in another example if you don't wish to build the soap message yourself.

# GetApptsUsingEWS.ps1
#    Powershell script to retrieve all appointments for a given date range using Exchange Web Services
param ( [DateTime] $rangeStart = [DateTime]::Now
      , [DateTime] $rangeEnd   = [DateTime]::Now.AddDays(7)
      , [System.Net.NetworkCredential] $credentials = (Get-Credential).GetNetworkCredential())

# Remember to set your exchange server address
$exchangeServerAddress = "http<s>://<ExchangeServer>/EWS/Exchange.asmx"

# Soap request derived from http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa564515.aspx
$soapRequest = @'
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<soap:Envelope xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
               xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema"
               xmlns:soap="http://schemas.xmlsoap.org/soap/envelope/"
               xmlns:t="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/types">
  <soap:Body>
    <FindItem Traversal="Shallow" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/exchange/services/2006/messages">
      <ItemShape>
        <t:BaseShape>IdOnly</t:BaseShape>
        <t:AdditionalProperties>
          <t:FieldURI FieldURI="calendar:Start"/>
          <t:FieldURI FieldURI="calendar:End"/>
          <t:FieldURI FieldURI="item:Subject"/>
        </t:AdditionalProperties>
      </ItemShape>
      <CalendarView MaxEntriesReturned="100" StartDate="{0}" EndDate="{1}"/>
      <ParentFolderIds>
        <t:DistinguishedFolderId Id="calendar"/>
      </ParentFolderIds>
    </FindItem>
  </soap:Body>
</soap:Envelope>
'@

# Put the range start and end date in the correct format
$soapRequest = $soapRequest -f $rangeStart.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:sszzz"), $rangeEnd.ToString("yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:sszzz")

# Create the request 
$webRequest = [System.Net.WebRequest]::Create($exchangeServerAddress)
$webRequest.ContentType = "text/xml"
$webRequest.Headers.Add("Translate", "F")
$webRequest.Method = "Post"
$webRequest.Credentials = $credentials

# Setup the soap request to send to the server
$content = [System.Text.Encoding]::UTF8.GetBytes($soapRequest)
$webRequest.ContentLength = $content.Length
$requestStream = $webRequest.GetRequestStream()
$requestStream.Write($content, 0, $content.Length)
$requestStream.Close()

# Get the xml response from the server
$webResponse = $webRequest.GetResponse()
$responseStream = $webResponse.GetResponseStream()
$responseXml = [xml](new-object System.IO.StreamReader $responseStream).ReadToEnd()
$responseStream.Close()
$webResponse.Close()

foreach ($appt in $responseXml.GetElementsByTagName("t:CalendarItem"))
{
    "{0:MM/dd hh:mm tt} - {1:MM/dd hh:mm tt} : {2}" -f [DateTime]$appt.Start, [DateTime]$appt.End, $appt.Subject
}

I've had terrible customer service from them. I ordered a set of puzzles on Jan 1st and I was told it would take about a week to receive my order. After 2 weeks I sent an email enquiring my shipping status. It took another followup mail and a week later to get a response back. On the Jan 22nd they finally email me back and tell me there was some sort of mix up and they will mail it out immediately.

Finally I recieve my order on Jan 26th. I'm thinking to myself, awesome I finally got my puzzles. However, there were two issues with my order. The set I ordered was not supposed to have duplicates but there was one duplicate. Then there was another puzzle which was broken. So in my set of 10 I have on broken puzzle and 1 duplicated puzzle (i.e. I got 8 unique non-broken puzzles).

I sent an email the same day I received them, Jan 26, telling them about the issues and asking if I could exchange the duplicate and broken puzzles. I've sent a follow up email every week for the last 3 weeks and I'm yet to receive a response. So 4 emails and a 5 weeks after receiving my order I still haven't received any response from them.

That was my first and that will be my last dealing with Brainpuzzles.com. I thought I was getting a pretty good price, but I guess their business model doesn't include customer service.

Lutz released Reflector for .NET 5.0

If you do any .NET development and you don't use Reflector for .NET then you are missing out. Scott posted a brief review of the new version. I think I'm most excited about the new analyze feature, it should come in handy.

Reflector for .NET
Reflector for .NET Add-Ins

Every now and than while debugging I need to either determine when a dll/module is loaded or need to attach a debugger to a process at startup that is started outside a debugger. I know there are settings that exist to do this but I always seem to forget exactly what they are. So for future reference here the registry entries.

Force a break while debugging when a dll/module is loaded

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\<modulename.dll>]
"BreakOnDllLoad"=dword:00000001

Force a process to start under the Visual Studio Debugger

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Image File Execution Options\<processname.exe>]
"Debugger"="vsjitdebugger.exe"

Useful links:

Junfeng  Image File Execution Options
Greggm  Breaking when a module loads
Greggm Inside 'Image File Execution Options' debugging
Oldnewthing Beware the Image File Execution Options key

If you are like me and are just so used to typing set to list and set environment variables then you might find this script useful.

if (test-path alias:set) { remove-item alias:set > $null }
function set
{
	[string]$var = $args
	if ($var -eq "")
	{
		get-childitem env: | sort-object name
	}
	else
	{
		if ($var -match "^(\S*?)\s*=\s*(.*)$")
		{
			set-item -force -path "env:$($matches[1])" -value $matches[2];		
		}
		else
		{
			write-error "ERROR Usage: VAR=VALUE"
		}
	}	
}

Just add this script to your Powershell profile and you will be all set :)

PS: If anyone is interested I updated the Powershell Language definitions for CodeHTMLer, it now highlights more of the built-in stuff such as cmdlets and variables.

I've been subscribed to Scott Hanselman's blog for a long time. I love all the tools, tips, etc he posts. Up until this point I have not really gotten into podcasts however due to Scott's awesome blog I figured I would give his podcast, Hanselminutes, a try.

I've listened to about 10 of the shows now and I must say I really enjoy it. It gives me something to listen to during my daily bus trip. If your are into .Net or Technology in general you might want to give Hanselminutes a try, I don't think you will be disappointed. Scott's goal is "Avoid wasting the listener's time." IMHO he is succeeding in that goal. Actually if anything he leaves me wanting more information about certain topics.

Thanks Scott and Carl keep up the good work!

The only thing I need to figure out is how best to sync up the podcast onto my Sandisk Sansa. Currently I'm just manually putting the shows on. Anyone have any recommendations for tools to do this?

Question

How do I access my Outlook contacts from my web application?

Short Answer

You don't, well at least you shouldn't (It is theoretically possible to access Outlook data from a web application, assuming Outlook is installed and the profile you wish to access data from is setup on the web server).

Long Answer

To address this question we need to realize that Outlook is a client application which is only a front end and local cache for a mail server (typically exchange server). Most web applications are server applications and thus run on servers which usually don't have client applications, such as Outlook, installed on them. Perhaps a better question would be "How do I access my Exchange contacts from my web application?". 

With that in mind lets explore a couple possible solutions for accessing data (not really Outlook data) from the Exchange server.

• WebDAV - Protocol that Outlook Web Access (OWA) uses to access your Exchange store
• Exchange Web Services (EWS) - New services added to Exchange 2007 to allow access to most data
• Active Directory Services Interface (ADSI) - For accessing general Exchange user data information (i.e. access the Global Address List)

These are just three common technologies for accessing data on a Exchange server, for more details see the Exchange Server Development Center or Overview of Programming Features for Exchange Server. To provide a more complete example I've included some code samples and links for each of the three technologies. The code examples demonstrate how to do find contacts using each of the three methods. Keep in mind these samples can be extended to other data types such as mail and appointments, with the exception of ADSI. All the code samples are written in C# and write the data to the console, they can easily be converted to be used by an ASP.Net web application. Also remember to substitute <ExchangeServer>, <username>, <password>, and <domain> with the appropriate values for your Exchange server.

WebDAV

The sample retrieves all contacts from an exchange store which have a first name beginning with 'wes'. Keep in mind before making any Exchange WebDAV requests you must make an forms authorization request first (assuming the Exchange server has forms authorization enabled, which seems to generally be the case). You need to make the authorization request to get the set of authorization cookies to use with any subsequent WebDAV requests.

Helpful WebDAV Links:

Infinitec Exchange posts C# and JavaScript forms authentication examples
Marc Charbonneau Using .NET and WebDAV to access an Exchange server
Hitchhiker guide to enterprise development  Programmatically accessing to OWA through Web Dav
Exchange store property names

Exchange Web Services

This sample code goes through the process of creating a Exchange web service FindItem request. In essentially searches through the contact folder looking for any contact with first name starting with 'wes'.

Useful Exchange Web Service Links:

MSDN Exchange Web Services Reference
Stephen Griffin - Exchange Web Services and MAPI Props
Eric Lee - Exchange Server 2007 Web Service API for Developers

Active Directory Services Interface

This is a very simplified .Net sample of doing a search in the default active directory for any users that have a first name beginning with 'wes'. Keep in mind that this uses the default active directory on the machine you are running on, see DirectorySearcher.SearchRoot for more details. If you need to specify a particular machine/directory to start your search from then you need to create a DirectoryEntry and pass that to the DirectorySearcher.

Useful ADSI/LDAP Links:

InfiniTec How to get the Global Address List programmatically
Amit Zinman Creating a list of Users and their e-mail addresses
Steve Schofield .NET sample LDAP query looking for a specific user name of (smith) and System.DirectoryServices namespace
Mow PowerShell and Active Directory Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5

Disclaimer: The sample code described here is provided on an “as is” basis, without warranty of any kind, to the fullest extent permitted by law. It is for demonstration purposes only and is by now means production quality.