My Day with Form Regions and Custom Message Classes in Outlook 2007

Adam Calderon — Wed, 16 Jan 2008 17:58:00 GMT

I was creating a form region in Outlook 2007 today for appointments and I wanted to limit the form from showing up with every appointment. I read that you could associate the form region with a custom message class and once you did this the form region would only show up for messages of that type. So with that information in hand I marched through the New Outlook Form Region Wizard (see Figures 1–4) in Visual Studio 2008. I was trying to create an adjoining form region that would show up on the bottom of the appointment screen so when I got to “Select the form region you want to create” step (see Figure 2) I selected Adjoining and continued to “Identify Message Class that will show this form” step (see Figure 4) where I added my custom message class “IPM.Appointment.MyAppointment” and finished. After adding some content to my form region I started to debug my add-in. This is when the trouble began. I could not find my custom form anywhere. Normally you would go to File>New>Choose Forms… the form would be there (see Figure 5) ready for you to choose and enter data in. Not in this case. After a long process I finally figured out that a custom message class will only work with replacement and replace-all form regions and not adjoining which I was using. The note in the SDK (see Figure 6) hints at this but it doesn’t come out and say “It will only work with these types”.

Figure 1 – Selecting how to create your form region

Figure 2 – Choosing the form region type

Figure 3 – Naming your form region

Figure 4 – Determining Message class to use

Figure 5 – Selecting form in Outlook

Figure 6 – Note in SDK

Visual Studio 2008 Peformance Profiler

Adam Calderon — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 13:32:00 GMT

The Visual Studio Performance Profiler in Visual Studio 2008 is leaps and bounds better than it’s predecessor but as always finding any information on Beta technology is not the easiest thing to do. To help out I have included a few blog entries that are helping me understand what VS 2008 has to offer and a few that cover some background information as well.

This first blog entitled Solving WPF Performance Problems: Step 1 is a great blog by Tim Cahill that you can use to get started with. It covers VS 2005 but included a few good tidbits including a link to a website that contains the debug symbols for the Microsoft DLLs. Tim also has another blog Profiling WPF Applications from the Command Line that describes how to use the command line with the profiler. The examples cover startup and already running application scenarios which are now supported in the UI in VS 2008.

Ian Hu has a series of blog entries that cover the profiler in VS 2008 showing off a lot of the cool new features that make this profiler the best yet from Microsoft.

Collecting performance counter information with the Visual Studio Team System profiler

Pinpoint a performance issue using hotpath in Visual Studio 2008

The New Developer Menu in Visual Studio Team System

The Visual Studio Profiler Data Collection Control Part 1: Excluding Application Startup Time

Comparing performance reports with the Visual Studio Team System Profiler

.NET 3.5

My Day with Form Regions and Custom Message Classes in Outlook 2007

Visual Studio 2008 Peformance Profiler