Change calendar appointment colors programmatically

[Johan Machielse]

Hi all,

A customer likes to see particular label colors for the different
appointments in his calendar related to the location where the appointment
will take place. Also, when he is creating a new appointment he wants to see
the colors of the attendees in the scheduling assistant.

What is the best way to solve this customer requirement?
- Can I use .NET to make such an add-in (I’ve read CDO 1.21 is not supported
by .NET) ?
- Are there some working (.NET) examples that access the color label
properties of an appointment?
- Is it possible what the customer likes to have?

Thank you in advance!

Johan Machielse
Avanade

 

[Sue Mosher [MVP-Outlook]]

- Can I use .NET to make such an add-in (I’ve read CDO 1.21 is not supported

by .NET) ?

You can use the third-party Redemption library
(http://www.dimastr.com/redemption) with .NET as a replacement (and
improvement over) CDO.

- Are there some working (.NET) examples that access the color label
properties of an appointment?

I don't know of any .NET examples, but here's one for VBA using CDO that
will show you the right field to use:
http://www.outlookcode.com/codedetail.aspx?id=139

- Is it possible what the customer likes to have?

Setting the color label on the appointment is possible, but maybe your
customer is not aware that something similar can be done without programming
using automatic formatting of the view? Also, I would not recommend spending
much effort building such a system for Outlook 2003, because Outlook 2007
completely changes the way color coding in the calendar, basing it all on the
value of the Categories property.

Also, when he is creating a new appointment he wants to see

the colors of the attendees in the scheduling assistant.

That's not possible. Attendees don't have colors assigned to them.
--
Sue Mosher, Outlook MVP
Author of Microsoft Outlook Programming: Jumpstart
for Administrators, Power Users, and Developers

 

[Ken Slovak - [MVP - Outlook]]

It's possible and you can use the Outlook object model's PropertyAccessor
object to work with the labels in Outlook 2007. For earlier versions of
Outlook I'd recommend using the Redemption library, which is a COM wrapper
around Extended MAPI and which works with managed code.

There are code samples of working with labels at www.outlookcode.com but I'm
not sure how many are managed code or if most are in VBA or VB6 type code.