Over this weekend, I was just trying to perform a search in my (exchange account) Outlook inbox  via a C# WinForms application and initially i assumed i would need to write an add-in and do so. However a quick search revealed that i could just use the interop assemblies and perform the search:

ApplicationClass app = new ApplicationClass();

app.AdvancedSearchComplete += 

        new ApplicationEvents_11_AdvancedSearchCompleteEventHandler(app_AdvancedSearchComplete);

string folder = "'" + app.Session.GetDefaultFolder(OlDefaultFolders.olFolderInbox).FolderPath + "'";

app.AdvancedSearch(folder, "urn:schemas:httpmail:subject LIKE '%" + searchText + 

        "%' OR urn:schemas:httpmail:textdescription LIKE '%" + 

        searchText + "%'", true, DateTime.Now.Millisecond);

This above snippet sets up all we need to do the search and we handle it as follows:

void app_AdvancedSearchComplete(Search SearchObject)

{

    if (!DesignMode)

    {

        try

        {

            if (SearchObject.Results.Count > 0)

            {

                items.Clear();

                MailItem mailItemLoop = SearchObject.Results.GetFirst() as MailItem;

                do

                {

                    if (mailItemLoop != null)

                    {

                        items.Add(new OutlookSearchItem(mailItemLoop));

                    }

                    mailItemLoop = SearchObject.Results.GetNext() as MailItem;

                }

                while (mailItemLoop != null);

            }

        }

        catch(System.Exception ex)

        {

            MessageBox.Show(ex.Message);

        }

        finally

        {

            // Do data binding for display                 

        }

    }

Here is a screenshot of the sample application:

The sample code is here:

I hope someone finds it useful!

Recently I made an installer for an Outlook 2007 Add-in developed using VSTO/VS 2008 and it worked fine on all development machines I have, but I noticed that it would fail to run on a fresh VPC image.

I had added all the necessary CA permissions, correct registry entries to the installer but I could not figure out what was missing!

A bit of goggling and I found some interesting things that I would share here:

A shared office 2007 add-in would need the following as prerequisites

• .NET Framework
• VSTO Runtime
• Office 2007 Primary Interop Assemblies

So I decided to go ahead and add them to my installer but to my surprise the VS 2008 prerequisite dialog did not contain any of these. So how do i add them to the prerequisites dialog on my development machine???

It seems gotdotnet hosted such a tool which is now moved to codeplex. I could add all these 3 as a prerequisite and boom! it worked. This tool called the BMG or the Bootstrap Manifest Generator can take up arbitrary executables and MSI packages and add them as custom prerequisites!

A click once version of BMG can be found here.

Here is a nice article describing it.