Wes' Puzzling Blog

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

As some of you may (or may not) know I'm a developer working at Microsoft on the Outlook team. My primary focus is Outlook Programmability (i.e. Outlook COM Object Model). Now that Office 2007 is complete I would like to post some code samples of how to use some of the new Outlook Object Model API's. Two new API's I plan on discussing are the PropertyAccessor and the Table. However, if there are any general questions about Outlook programming that you would like me to discuss or post code samples for please let me know. I've already had a request for sample Powershell scripts that automate Outlook, so I will try to provide a couple examples of that.

If you use Windows Live Writer as your blogging tool and Outlook 2007 as your RSS aggregator then you maybe interested in this VBA macro. It will pull the necessary information from the currently selected RSS Item in Outlook and call the Windows Live Writer BlogThis API to create a new post.

I've started using Windows Live Writer as my primary blogging tool. So far I like it. However, it was missing an easy way to insert highlighted code into posts. I know there are a few other plugins that can insert highlighted code, but since I'm the author of a syntax highlighting tool named CodeHTMLer I figured I needed to write my own plugin.

I don't how many times I've needed to reboot a machine while accessing it over Remote Desktop. I usually just open a command prompt and type shutdown -t 0 -r to reboot. However, Raymond provides four ways to do this.

The purpose of this quick start guide is to step through a simple but complete example of how to create a third party component with configurable run-time checks of a contract specification using nContract. To fully follow along with this example you will need to download nContract QuickStart.

I while ago (almost 2 years) I posted a way to create a string stream in .Net. There has been a number of new comments added to that post recently so I figured I needed to update that example. Most API's that look for a Stream will also allow either a TextReader or TextWriter depending on the context. Therefore, in those cases when you have a string using StringReader or StringWriter is probably better then creating a MemoryStream like in my old example because you don't have to deal with the encoding.

If you are like me then you do a ton of web searches everyday. I usually middle click a link from the results of a web search and take a look at that page then close that tab. Which is where my frustration comes in. By default when you close a tab in IE 7 the tab that gains focus is the tab with the same index of the tab you just closed (unless of course it was the right most tab then it just focuses on the right most tab). However, this is not what I want to happen. I would prefer that the tab focus go back to the page that got me to the page I just closed, in this case the search results.