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I was really excited to see the news today that Visual Studio Tools for Office 2005 will have support for Outlook. I always wondered why they would call something Visual Studio Tools for Office but only include support for Excel and Word. Well, Eric Carter and Eric Lippert have announced news that Steve Balmer made public today.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, then you know that I had some not so fun, but highly educational, months spent with none other than the .NET Framework and Outlook 2003. I found and complained to many folks inside Microsoft about what a sorry state managed programming for Outlook was, and thankfully this announcement puts to rest some of the most difficult aspects of managed programming in Outlook. Additionally, with the recent addition of the Office 2003 Primary Interop Assemblies Redistributable, even deployment gets easier.

To recap:

• You no longer need to use a shim
• You get your own AppDomain (translation, you won't hose other addins)
• You have a much simpler interface to implement
• Debugging seems much easier
• You get a strongly typed Application object
• You no longer have to call ReleaseComObject
• You no longer have to meticulously manage all your Outlook objects
• Outlook will now cleanly shutdown!
• I no longer need to fill my brain with COM stuff that I don't care to know about
• Some one else gets to work around Outlook bugs .

This all seems to good to be true .

You can read more here:

• Eric Carter
• Eric Lippert
• Architecture Overview Article

Many thanks to all those involved in listening to us complain endlessley about the problems and doing something about them!