Tech-Ed, Smart Client, VSTO, and Outlook Addin's
I want to appologize for the delay in posting Blogs, but we have been very busy on getting Whidbey out the door and adding a few new features like Smart tags as well as Outlook Addin's.
Tech-Ed WebCasts for Smart Client as well as other interesting sessions. The link for the web casts will require you to register but this seems to be for logging purposes only. I was not charged or forced to receive email for signing up.
For those of you tracking Smart Client Development for the Office platform, you will see that VSTO announced a long asked for feature in the Whidbey Visual Studio Tools for Office product. Support for Managed Outlook Addin's! This VSTO 2005 feature improves upon the Visual Studio managed COM Addin projects. By providing AppDomain isolation for the Addin's, the Host (Outlook), as well as other Addin's receive a level of isolation and unloadability. There is currently no way to unload a customization (Custom code written for the purpose of automating a Host) from the default App Domain.
In the case where all Addin's are loaded in the default AD (App Domain).
- You will increase the likelihood of one Addin adversely effecting another Addin
- Increase the memory overhead of the Host process with each Addin loaded (there is no way to unload an Addin without destroying an AD)
- Increases the potential for a single Addin to bring down the Host process.
There are additional enhancements in the Outlook Addin that I hope to Blog about later.
For more on AppDomains check out Chris Brumme's blog.
More Outlook Addin links