Professional Outlook® 2007 Programming

Chapter 2. What's New in Outlook 2007

This chapter explains the most important new collections, objects, methods, properties, and events in the Outlook object model. So many things were added to the Outlook object model in Outlook 2007 that the object model doubled its size, making it hard to select the most important new features.

At the end of the Outlook 2000 beta, the Outlook MVPs (Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals) involved in Outlook development wrote a whitepaper listing items they wanted added to the Outlook object model so that development could be done using only Outlook code, without dipping into other APIs. Thanks to the splendid work of the Outlook team at Microsoft, spearheaded by Randy Byrne and Ryan Gregg, we finally have almost everything we asked for so many years ago.

The selections for this chapter are the ones I consider the most important, based on many years as an Outlook developer. All new Outlook 2007 features are covered in this book even if they aren't in this chapter:

• The unified object model: The Outlook object model now has many of the properties and methods of other APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), such as CDO 1.21 (Collaboration Data Objects), making Outlook 2007 a complete development platform. For most programming tasks, Outlook programmers now don't have to master additional APIs to perform basic Outlook programming functions. This chapter explains important new additions to the Outlook object model, such as the PropertyAccessor, Stores ...