Chapter 8 -- Outlook 2000 Development Features

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Chapter 8

Microsoft Outlook 2000, released with Microsoft Office 2000, offers a slew of enhancements you can employ in your collaborative applications. These enhancements include COM add-in support, an enhanced object model, folder home pages, and Microsoft Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) support. In addition to the enhancements, Outlook 2000 provides backward compatibility with any of the solutions you developed in previous versions of Outlook. This means that all the techniques and code we've looked at for Outlook 98 apply for Outlook 2000. And because the forms environment in Outlook 2000 has not changed, you use the same tools for both Outlook 98 and Outlook 2000.

This chapter discusses COM add-ins and the changes to the Outlook object model. We will also look at how to write applications by using VBA in Outlook, and explore the trade-offs of developing a COM add-in vs. developing a VBA program directly inside Outlook. In Chapter 10, we'll update the Account Tracking application by adding a COM add-in as well as two folder home pages, which will illustrate how to take advantage of the new objects in the Outlook object model, use the Outlook View control, and write COM add-ins.