Special Edition Using® Microsoft® Office Outlook® 2003

Creating an Outlook COM Add-In

Another option you can take advantage of when developing with Outlook is to create a COM add-in. A COM add-in is a program that actually runs in process with Outlook. It loads when Outlook loads, and terminates when Outlook terminates. A COM add-in enables you to manipulate toolbars, menus, and even add additional property pages to the Tools, Options dialog box present in Outlook.

There are several advantages to COM add-ins. The main advantage in Outlook 2003 is that, by default, all COM add-ins are now trusted. That means if you use the default Outlook application object created by your COM add-in, any code that ...