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2009-02-24T16:38:00.002Z

Writing Outlook 2007 Addins using C#.Net (using a COM Shim)

2009-01-20T14:07:00.001Z

Addins that are developed in .Net need something Microsoft are calling a �COM shim�, which basically receives OL2007�s COM requests and passes them to the .NET assembly and back again. Its because Office is still COM based, so treats the core .Net DLL (mscoree.dll) as one single COM object. The COM is written in C++ (although I�m unsure whether this would be managed C++ - if it is, surely its still .NET thus defeating the purpose), but can still be added into the .Net solution for the addin, since we can mix projects in different CLR languages in the same solution.

To a .NET developer, native C++ with COM looks like a foreign language. Thankfully, some employees at Microsoft recognized this and Microsoft provides an unsupported wizard to create a COM shim, the COM Shim Wizard. This allows you to auto-generate (mostly) the required shim for the addin by passing it the .Net Addin assembly that you wish to �wrap�.

How to actually use the COM Shim

Run the COM shim wizard for your add-in

Verify that the COM shim is working:
- Add e.g. a MessageBox to your OnConncetion method in your .NET Connect class. If the MessageBox fires, then you know that your .NET add-in is being loaded correctly. Keep in mind that any Ribbon modifications will not be displayed at this point in time.
- Open the Add-Ins dialog (e.g. Outlook Options, Add-Ins). Your add-in name has to be listed with the DLL of the Shim. If it still says mscoree.dll there, then your shim is not loading. Most likely, your .NET add-in is overwriting the entry in the registry for the shim DLL, which means the shim will not be loaded. Make sure that �Register for COM interop� is switched off in the project settings for your .NET add-in. If you forgot to switch that setting off, rebuild the COM shim after you switched it off.
- If your add-in shows up with the correct DLL, but doesn�t load (runtime error in the Add-Ins dialog), then you should check whether you are strong-naming the .NET DLL (Signing in the project properties). Also make sure to not delay sign at this point in time. If you forgot to strong name it, you might just want to delete the shim and run the wizard again, or edit the ShimConfig.cpp file to list the correct public key.
- If you correctly strong-named it, but it still doesn�t load, then check whether you actually copied the .NET DLL into the same directory that Visual Studio creates the Shim DLL. The COM Shim works by looking for your .NET DLL in the same directory the Shim DLL is in. If your .NET DLL is not there, then it cannot be loaded. Visual Studio doesn�t copy the file for you automatically.

Once you have a working Shim, you can start modifying it to support IRibbonExtensibility. The first modification you have to make is to import the main Office DLL, so that your COM shim knows about IRibbonExtensibility. To do this, open �stdafx.h�, and paste the following into the file:
#import "C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\OFFICE12\MSO.DLL" raw_interfaces_only, raw_native_types, named_guids, auto_search
You have to paste this immediately after the two #import statements that are already in the file (the first one for �mscorlib.tlb�, the second one starting with �libid:�. If the DLL is located in a different directory (or different drive), then adjust the path accordingly, even though I believe Visual Studio might find the DLL automatically at compile time and adjust the path itself.

Open �ConnectProxy.h� and add
using namespace Office;
After the #include statements on the top.

In �ConnectProxy.h�, find the COM_MAP. The COM_MAP begins with �BEGIN_COM_MAP(CConnectProxy)�. You need to add
COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY_AGGREGATE(IID_IRibbonExtensibility, m_pConnect)
At the end of the COM MAP. This statement will make the shim supply your Connect class to Office when it asks for the IRibbonExtensibility interface. After this modification, your COM MAP statement should look like this:
BEGIN_COM_MAP(CConnectProxy) COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY2(IDispatch, AddInDesignerObjects::IDTExtensibility2) COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY(AddInDesignerObjects::IDTExtensibility2) COM_INTERFACE_ENTRY_AGGREGATE(IID_IRibbonExtensibility, m_pConnect) END_COM_MAP()

With these three additional lines in the COM shim, you should now have a working COM shim that supports RibbonX. Compile the Shim and open your Office application again to test it.

Windows 7

2009-01-10T22:19:00.001Z

So I bit the bullet and I'm trying Win 7 out on a spare machine. Once I went through the pain of getting network drivers for it so I could get it online, then finding antivirus for it, it seems to work reasonably well. Heavier testing to come, but the obligatory screenshot from my machine is at http://bit.ly/14bFj

2008-11-17T09:38:00.001Z

aggregating his social network updates

Hanging out with the BBC online

2008-10-13T08:49:00.001Z

First Bill Thompson (roaming tech pundit) retweets something I send him, now I have Stephen Fry (yes, the Stephen Fry) following my tweets.

MySQL hacker needs $400K for his son's bone-marrow transplant

2008-09-28T18:19:00.001Z

MySQL hacker needs $400K for his son's bone-marrow transplant: "The MySQL community -- who create, maintain and support the leading free database -- are raising funds for Andrii Nikitin, a MySQL support engineer in Ukraine whose little boy, Ivan, needs a $400,000 bone-barrow transplant.

'My family got bad news - doctors said allogenic bone marrow transplantation is the only chance for my son Ivan.

'8 months of heavy and expensive immune suppression brought some positive results so we hoped that recovering is just question of time.

'Ivan is very brave boy - not every human meets so much suffering during whole life, like Ivan already met in his 2,5 years. But long road is still in front of us to get full recover - we are ready to come it through.

'Ukrainian clinics have no technical possibility to do such complex operation, so we need 150-250K EUR for Israel or European or US clinic. The final decision will be made considering amount we able to find. Perhaps my family is able to get ~60% of that by selling the flat where parents leave and some other goods, but we still require external help.'

Donate to help Andrii Nikitin's son Ivan

(Via Boing Boing.)

I'm over here...

2008-09-02T15:15:00.001Z

To busy to blog these days. You've got more chance of finding out what I'm up to by looking at Twitter :-

follow NiceGuyUK at http://twitter.com

Writing Outlook Addins in C#.Net

2008-06-02T19:22:00.001Z

Ok, so the title of this post is a blatant Google magnet attempt. But honestly, that's what I've been doing today and its been the most fun I've had coding in a while.

I'm converting an old VB6 COM addin for Outlook versions prior to 2007 so that it does indeed work with 2007. Its being rewritten in C# and due to some clever interop work (not my cleverness, I gleaned information from this blog post by Patrick Schmid) I don't even need to hack my way around Outlook's security model with the Redemption Library.

Once its done, I'm toying with the idea of writing more addins for Outlook 2007 that I think I'll find useful (and hopefully other people will too)

Windows XP SP3

2008-05-04T18:03:00.001Z

Upgraded my sole Windows PC from XP SP2 to XP SP3 tonight. It seems stable so far, but then I've probably already got most of the patches that they rolled into Service Pack 3 anyway. If I hit any odd issues (other than the annoyance of it reverting my hacked uxtheme.dll so I lose my Royale Remixed theme), I'll post about it here.

Anatomy of a web hack

2008-04-30T11:50:00.001Z

One of my websites recently got hacked (through FTP - provider says its password related, but I'm not convinced). The miscreant put over 5000 HTML pages in one of my directories, each of which is infected with a piece of obfuscated javascript. I've tidied it up for readability :-

What this does is call another script from another domain (dnsmanagersite.info). This script, in turn, forces a redirect to a porn site, which tries to force you to download what it claims is an update for Adobe Flash. I have no doubt at all that it is a virus/trojan/keylogger/backdoor or other such piece of crap.

The trouble with AJAX frameworks...

2008-04-22T21:01:00.001Z

As my brother would say, I've been busier than a one-legged Riverdancer just lately....

I'm working for two clients simultaneously - a mix of Classic ASP and ASP.Net by day and PHP5 by night. In both cases, I'm making use of AJAX Frameworks and herein lies the problem. Conceptually, using a framework rather than dong everything yourself "from scratch" is a good thing, since it should save re-inventing the wheel.

However, I'm finding in both cases (Microsoft ASP.Net Ajax for one, QCodo for the other) that things are either incomplete, inadequately documented, or just plain broken. I'm increasingly finding myself spending more time fixing little rendering issues (or things that don't render at all) and less time dealing with the core functionality of the application.

Its frustrating, to say the least.

PHP Hacking

2008-03-24T14:51:00.001Z

Started trying out some UI concepts in PHP for a project I'm working on for a customer. I've now managed to get a data-bound composite control rendered with drag and drop functionality. I'm trying for a drag-and drop paradigm in a web app, since the brief for this customer states it should be as easy to use as possible.

So far so good. Of course, I wouldn't be anywhere near this stage without the excellent QCodo framework for PHP. Thanks Mike!

I am Borg

2008-03-06T12:19:00.001Z

Managed to dig out my old BlueTooth headset and as well as getting it working with my mobile phone, I've also managed to get it working with Skype on my MacBook, using the built-in Bluetooth. The thought hadn't occurred to me earlier, but the combination works really well.

Shame that the headset makes me look like a Borg though...

Going solo

2008-02-21T11:44:00.001Z

I'm re-declaring my independence again. I'm going back to contracting, with a healthy dose of working directly for clients as well. Already I've got the potential for a couple of systems that people want lined up, but contracting would probably be my main income.

Email - wonderfully useful

2008-02-21T11:42:00.001Z

I don't have spam.

I do, however, have a cupboard full of herbal remedies for erectile disfunction that some nice chaps from the Interwebs sold me, a timeshare in Spain, a mate in Nigeria that owes me $67,000,000 (any day now!),
some Rolex watches I got at a fantastic price and some rather interesting cinematic productions from a Ms. Hilton.

I love how many useful things come to me by email :-D

Broad-but-not-quite-as-broad-as-it-should-be-band

2008-02-13T20:54:00.004Z

My Broadband connection is getting slower, especially since I'm paying extra for their top-end unlimited service. They always churn out the old "may vary depending from your distance to the exchange" excuse. The exchange is 400 metres away, I can see it from my bedroom window. When I first got it, I was getting around 6mb (they say up to 8mb, but it invariably never is). Latest speed test shown below :-

I shall continue to monitor this one and if it doesn't improve, I'm gonna complain.

[UPDATE 5:40am]
Looks like they're throttling the connection at peak times. Here's my off-peak score :-

UK Government To Terminate File Sharers' Net Access

2008-02-12T15:21:00.001Z

"An anonymous reader writes 'New plans published by the UK Govt show that they hope to terminate internet access for people suspected of breaching copyright by file sharing. Under the proposed new laws ISPs who fail to enforce the policy will face prosecution in the courts. Users falling foul of the new law will be subject to a three strike policy: First suspected instance of illegal file sharing they would receive a warning, at the second � a suspension, and at the third they will have their Internet connection terminated. It isn't clear whether users will be prevented from ever using the internet again, or whether simply subscribing to a new ISP will reset the process.'

Got the coding bug again

2008-02-11T15:23:00.001Z

Continuing my permanent cycle of coding like mad then being lazy for a couple of months then coding again.... I've finally got around to starting to address some of the bug fixes and enhancements for my GNFOViewer, as requested by Ubuntu Forums people here.

The nicer exception handling was an easy quick win, but the saving of preferences is proving a bigger challenge. I added support for GConf to store settings and certainly the preserving of the text colours inversion is working fine, as is the window sizing, but the window position preservation is still buggy. Why they decided not to implement suitable events on Gtk.Window is beyond me - this business of Widget.ConfigureEvent seems a horrendously convoluted ay of doing things.

Speed boost

2008-02-04T10:38:00.001Z

Upgraded the graphics card in my PC this weekend to give it a much needed performance boost. My old onboard nVidia 6150LE got replaced with a PCI Express nVidia GeForce 7300 GT. I ran 3DMark 06 before and after the upgrade to compare performance :-

nVidia 6150 LE (Onboard) - 236 3DMarks
nVidia 7300 Gt (PCIe) - 1873 3DMarks

Nice improvement!

Webmongering on the Mac

2008-01-29T11:24:00.001Z

Happier with my Mac today - I have got Apache, PHP, MySQL and PHPMySQLAdmin all working, so my web development environment I used on my old Linux laptop is now restablished on this Macbook :-)

World of Waitcraft

2008-01-21T20:07:00.001Z

I spent about 8 hours downloading the 10 day trial version of World of Warcraft yesterday, leaving it running overnight. I come home from work tonight looking forward to giving it a try, but on starting it up, it tells me it needs another 871Mb (5 hours) worth of patch downloads. So I guess thats another day lost of my 10 day trial. By the time it has everything it needs to let me play the game, my trial period will be over! Do they want people to play this thing or what?

Telly on the computer

2008-01-19T16:36:00.000Z

Having rebuilt my machine back to its original XP Media Center Edition 2005, I've been playing with the TV tuner (a WinTV Nova-T DVB-T USB stick). I kept getting the error the video decoder has either malfunctioned or is not installed, but after some Googling, I found the answer was to install a MPEG2 decoder such as this GPL-licensed one available at http://www.deskshare.com/download/mpeg2decoder.exe.

Got my indoor aerial plugged in (strangely, we don't have an outdoor aerial), and it seems to be working. Now its time to work out how to record Primeval tonight!

Worst default setting. Ever.

2008-01-17T14:42:00.001Z

iTunes has just wiped out over 3 years of collected music on my iPod. By default it attempts to sync the iTunes database on the computer with that on the iPod. I just installed an iTunes update today (cos it was listed in the Software Updates on my MacBook) and it reverted the setting that I had previously changed, telling it *not* to do this.

A lot of this music I'll not be able to replace. Very disappointed with Apple's choice of default setting.

XNA Game Studio 2.0 and Visual Studio

2007-12-30T18:49:00.000Z

I was excited that Microsoft had release the new XNA Game Studio 2.0, since I was looking to do some little game development. However, it only works with Visual Studio 2005 products (full or express editions) and I run Visual Studio 2008.

After getting nowhere trying to make it work, I attempted to get the free Express edition of Visual C# 2005, but of course, the download page for the Express Editions points at all the new 2008 editions. Luckily, after much digging around, I managed to find this link to Visual C# 2005 Express Edition, which others in the same position may find useful

Coding again

2007-12-29T16:10:00.000Z

After a long hiatus from writing any code, I'm adding a few new features to my GTK NFO viewer, from a request on the forums. I've not looked a it in a while and now MonoDevelop crashes whenever I try to load the project.

I've having to rebuild my whole dev environment from source in order to get the latest version, cos Ubuntu's Monodevelop is woefully outdated. *Sigh*