Professional Outlook® 2007 Programming

Chapter 1. An Introduction to Outlook 2007 Programming

Outlook stores items such as mail, appointment, task, and contact items in tables in a hierarchically structured database. This is unlike the underlying document object model that most other Office applications use and requires a change of orientation for programmers experienced in programming applications, such as Word or Excel. For this reason, this chapter explains Outlook's data model and introduces Outlook's data storage and data presentation models.

In this chapter, you first open the Outlook VBA project and set it up for use in creating and running macros and prototype code. Using the Outlook VBA project is often the easiest way to quickly test and prototype your Outlook code. Next, you discover the concept of a NameSpace and how to access Outlook data in folders and in individual Outlook items. This is the basis of all Outlook data access and is a building block for all Outlook programming. You next see how Outlook stores its data and how to access that data. In Outlook 2007, you can now access data either with the traditional Folders and Items collections or with the new Stores collection and Table object. The new members of the Outlook object model are explained in Chapter 2. Finally, this chapter discusses Inspectors—the windows that display items such as emails or appointments, as well as Explorers—the windows that display folders. Working with these collections is critical for any Outlook program that works with ...