Adding Subpane to Outlook 2003? ADX a good choice?

[Calebmei]

Hi,

As VSTO documentation (and me spending a week ) confirms
CustomTaskPanes is only supported in OL 2007, but not OL2003.

And the closest we can do in OL 2003 is to add an anchored commandBar
with Windows Form Control to simulate the custom task pane.

Anyone has any luck with anchor commandbar with Windows Form approach?
I am unable to add msoControlPane [as suggest from MSDN, only popup
menu and 4 other types are supported in
CommandBar.Controls.Add()]

For example,
Office.CommandBarControl MyButton;
MyButton =
commandbar.Controls.Add(Office.MsoControlType.msoControlPane, missing,
missing, missing, true);

If no way to work around, is ADX a good choice? Seems like Add-in
express is the only one offer such feature, are there alternatives?

Thanks in advance.

Cheers,
Tom

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

I haven't used ADX, so I can't comment on using that tool.

The only other way to do what you want would be to overlay your commandbar
window with a form using Win32 API calls to locate the commandbar (if you
can) and then position and size your window in that area of the screen.

 

[Calebmei]

The only other way to do what you want would be to overlay your commandbar
window with a form using Win32 API calls to locate the commandbar (if you
can) and then position and size your window in that area of the screen.

Thank you!! I will give it a try.

In such case, if the Outlook Explorer resize, minimize, or perform
other UI actions, the Windows Form just have to listen to all those
events? There's seems no way I can anchor it into Outlook right?

Thanks and really appreciate!

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

Nope, no other way to do that directly from Outlook other than listening. If
you decide to go with ADX then you'd use whatever methods that provides or
let it handle the moving/sizing itself.

 

[Calebmei]

Thanks! And thank you for your book, it's really helpful for outlook
developer.