outlook interview questions
Top outlook frequently asked interview questions
For some weeks now we have been fighting with an issue where at a small number of customers our Outlook addin gets unloaded and disabled for yet undetermined reasons. By "disabled" I mean that Outlook changes the following registry value from 3 to 2 which in effect means that the addin will not be loaded on next startup:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins\[OurAddin.sProgID]\LoadBehavior
There is no error message and neither do any exceptions show up in the log files that our addin produces itself.
I have already found the following page which specifically deals with the LoadBehavior change issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/vsod/archive/2008/04/22/Troubleshooting-com-add-in-load-failures.aspx
However, none of the possible reasons proposed there appear to be applicable:
- The addin is not merely listed in the Disabled Items list.
- There are no unhandled exceptions neither in the
IDTExtensibility2 methods nor anywhere else in the code. All code is wrapped in try/catch equivalents and all exception output is emitted only via OutputDebugString or into a log file.
- The error appears to be independent of anti-virus software, i.e. it also occurs with it disabled.
- Disabling all other addins also has no effect on the error.
So, what else can cause Outlook to disable an addin?
Some more details / observations:
- We haven't been able to reproduce the issue in our test environments so far so we haven't yet been able to attach a debugger while the issue occurs.
- The issue never occurs while we try to watch what happens via remote support (TeamViewer). I suspect this is because TeamViewer uses a hook DLL that injects itself into all running processes (including Outlook) and thus affects the memory layout, timing, thread order, whatever.
- Whenever we compile a new version of the addin to try out something new the addin will typically work fine for a couple of hours or even days only to eventually get disabled again. Once this has happened all subsequent attempts to get the addin to load on that machine (by manually changing back the LoadBehavior value) will fail (i.e. LoadBehaviour will simply change back to 2) until we compile and deploy another build (or try to watch using TeamViewer - see above).
- Typically the addin will get unloaded right on Outlook startup though occasionally it also does happen after Outlook has already been running for some time. The log file in those cases looks completely inconspicious - the addin simply goes through the regular shutdown steps just as if Outlook had been closed normally.
- As far as I can tell from our log files and by observing the issue via SysInternals ProcessMonitor, when the addin get disabled on Outlook startup (rather than during the session) the DLL gets unloaded even before the COM object (i.e. the addin) gets instantiated (log messages in the constructor never show up).
- We have put
OutputDebugString messages in initialization sections (this a Delphi DLL). None of them show up when the addin fails to load.
Only a very small fraction of our customers is affected by this issue. We have several tens of thousands of installations from whom we haven't received any reports about this.
UPDATE: It seems that often (but not always) one of the last things that gets logged before the addin gets unloaded is an exception with text "OLE error 800A01A8". That exception gets caught by a global exception handler built into the framework I'm using (Add-in-Express) and does not appear originate from anywhere it my own code every single method of which is by now entirely wrapped in try..catch. This typically occurs right after I set the visibility of my CommandBarButtons from an Inspector's Activate event handler.
Common properties of all affected machines:
- Windows XP Professional, up-to-date patch level
- Outlook 2003 Professional, up-to-date patch level
- varying versions of McAfee Virus Scan (though disabling it has no effect - see above)
- Users are members of the local Administrators group
One more thing to note which very probably is significant as well (though maybe not as much as I first thought):
We are using a licensing / copy protection module from a third-party vendor which wraps the compiled DLL in a "shell" and only unpacks it on-the-fly. Ever since I found out that the addin gets unloaded even before any of our own code gets executed this has been my prime suspect. However, while the vendor confirmed that there may be unhandled exceptions in their code a log file produced by a special debug version of the protection shell showed that the unpacking process completed successfully and control was already handed back to the protected DLL before Outlook unloaded the addin. So it appears that whatever causes Outlook to unload our addin happens between the completion of the protection shell's initialization and our own code.
Any more ideas?
Source: (StackOverflow)
Is this possible? I want to have the To:, Body, and an Attachment all pre-populated so all the user has to do is click send. Thanks!
Source: (StackOverflow)
I need to read from Outlook .MSG file in .NET without using COM API for Outlook (cos it will not be installed on the machines that my app will run). Are there any free 3rd party libraries to do that? I want to extract From, To, CC and BCC fields. Sent/Receive date fields would be good if they are also stored in MSG files.
Source: (StackOverflow)
I have an html newsletter which works in most email clients, but the formatting is messed up in Outlook.
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/loose.dtd">
<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
<style type="text/css">
body {
background-color: #98AFC7;
}
</style>
<title></title>
</head>
<body>
<table border="1px solid" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="10px" width="600" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; height:auto; background-color: #ffffff; margin-top: 60px;">
<tr>
<td align="top" style="padding: 10px; font-family: arial; font-size: 12px;" ><center>Email not displaying correctly?<a rel='nofollow' href="#"><strong> View it in your browser</strong></a></center></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid; height: 80px; text-align: center; padding: 10px;"><img src="http://demo.frostmiller.com/email/img/banner.jpg" alt="Banner will go here" align="middle" style="border: 1px solid;"></td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td>
<table style="border: 0; cellspacing: 0; cellpadding: 10px; height: auto;">
<tr>
<td valign="baseline" style="padding: 10px; width:400px; border: 1px solid; halign: top;">
<h3>Top Stories</h3>
<ul>
<li>Topic 1</li>
<li>Topic 2</li>
<li>Topic 3</li>
</ul>
<p>Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.</p>
</td>
<td valign="baseline" style="padding: 10px; border: 1px solid;">
<h3>Latest News</h3>
<p>
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting,
</p>
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td cellpadding="10px" style="border: 1px solid; cellspacing: 0; width: 100%; height: auto; text-align: center;">
<strong>Copyright © 2011 Frost Miller Group </strong>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td style="border: 1px solid; cellspacing: 0; cellpadding: 10px; width: 100%; height: auto">
<center>
<a rel='nofollow' href="#">Contact Us</a>
<a rel='nofollow' href="#">Terms of Use</a>
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</td>
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What changes do I need to make in order to get it to display correctly in Outlook?
Source: (StackOverflow)
My problem goes something like this:
A client receives an email sent by Exchange Server.
In the mail he has a formatted body with HTML with a couple of links that have
rel='nofollow' href='mailto:etc...'
My question is: can i insert HTML formatted body in the mailto: part of the href?
something like
<a rel='nofollow' href='mailto:me@me.com?subject=Me&body=<b>ME</b>'>Mail me</a>?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm sending an email using the dotnet framework. Here is the template that I'm using to create the message:
Date of Hire: %HireDate%
Annual Salary: %AnnualIncome%
Reason for Request: %ReasonForRequest%
Name of Voluntary Employee: %FirstName% %LastName%
Total Coverage Applied For: %EECoverageAmount%
Guaranteed Coverage Portion: %GICoveragePortion%
Amount Subject to Medical Evident: %GIOverage%
When the messages is received in outlook, outlook tells me "Extra line breaks in this message were removed". And the message displays like this:
Date of Hire: 9/28/2001
Annual Salary: $100,000
Reason for Request: New Hire
Name of Voluntary Employee: Ronald Weasley Total Coverage Applied For: $500,000 Guaranteed Coverage Portion: $300,000.00 Amount Subject to Medical Evident: $200,000
Note how Outlook incorrectly removes needed line breaks after the name, EECoverageAmount, etc...
It's important for the email recepients to get a correctly formatted email, and I have to assume that some of them use outlook 2003. I also can't assume they will know enough to shutoff the autoclean feature to get the message to format properly.
I have viewed these messages in other mail clients and they display correctly
some more information:
- I am using UTF-8 BodyEncoding (msg.BodyEncoding = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8)
- The msg.Body is being read from a UTF-8 encoded text file, and each line is terminated with a crlf.
Question:
How do I change the format of the message to avoid this problem?
Source: (StackOverflow)
having trouble getting multiple lines to work correctly in a mailto link
In my case I'm testing it with an Outlook default mail reader.
The following is put in an anchor href:
mailto:email@address.com?&subject=test&body=type%20your&body=message%20here
only "message here" shows up in the email body. (whether I use chrome or IE)
thoughts?
Source: (StackOverflow)
Using the example provided in codeproject I am struggling to work out where I can find the reference to the library Microsoft.Office.Core.
I am getting the error "The referenced component 'Microsoft.Office.Core' could not be found."
I only have office 2007 enterprise edition and outlook 2003 installed on this system. Could this be the cause of this? Otherwise which specific dll am I supposed to be referencing?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm trying to send an email in Java but when I read the body of the email in Outlook, it's gotten rid of all my linebreaks. I'm putting \n at the ends of the lines but is there something special I need to do other than that? The receivers are always going to be using Outlook.
I found a page on microsoft.com that says there's a 'Remove line breaks' "feature" in Outlook so does this mean there's no solution to get around that other than un-checking that setting?
Thanks
Source: (StackOverflow)
Is it possible to read a .PST file using C#? I would like to do this as a standalone application, not as an Outlook addin (if that is possible).
If have seen other SO questions similar to this mention MailNavigator but I am looking to do this programmatically in C#.
I have looked at the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook namespace but that appears to be just for Outlook addins. LibPST appears to be able to read PST files, but this is in C (sorry Joel, I didn't learn C before graduating).
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks!
EDIT:
Thank you all for the responses! I accepted Matthew Ruston's response as the answer because it ultimately led me to the code I was looking for. Here is a simple example of what I got to work (You will need to add a reference to Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook):
using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
namespace PSTReader {
class Program {
static void Main () {
try {
IEnumerable<MailItem> mailItems = readPst(@"C:\temp\PST\Test.pst", "Test PST");
foreach (MailItem mailItem in mailItems) {
Console.WriteLine(mailItem.SenderName + " - " + mailItem.Subject);
}
} catch (System.Exception ex) {
Console.WriteLine(ex.Message);
}
Console.ReadLine();
}
private static IEnumerable<MailItem> readPst(string pstFilePath, string pstName) {
List<MailItem> mailItems = new List<MailItem>();
Application app = new Application();
NameSpace outlookNs = app.GetNamespace("MAPI");
// Add PST file (Outlook Data File) to Default Profile
outlookNs.AddStore(pstFilePath);
MAPIFolder rootFolder = outlookNs.Stores[pstName].GetRootFolder();
// Traverse through all folders in the PST file
// TODO: This is not recursive, refactor
Folders subFolders = rootFolder.Folders;
foreach (Folder folder in subFolders) {
Items items = folder.Items;
foreach (object item in items) {
if (item is MailItem) {
MailItem mailItem = item as MailItem;
mailItems.Add(mailItem);
}
}
}
// Remove PST file from Default Profile
outlookNs.RemoveStore(rootFolder);
return mailItems;
}
}
}
Note: This code assumes that Outlook is installed and already configured for the current user. It uses the Default Profile (you can edit the default profile by going to Mail in the Control Panel). One major improvement on this code would be to create a temporary profile to use instead of the Default, then destroy it once completed.
Source: (StackOverflow)
As a programmer at a big corporation, I frequently send Outlook emails that contain code samples.
I'll actually type code directly into an email. This inevitably causes problems, as Outlook really likes to format text in pleasing but unhelpful ways. My code needs to be copyable out of the email and directly into code, so I don't want Outlook to mess with it by adding special characters or whatnot.
So I always need to tweak options like:
- Don't capitalize first letter of every sentence (else all my functions be Public instead of public)
- Disable smart quotes (fancy quotes don't copy+paste out of emails well)
- Never use spell checker (because it just gets annoying)
I also like my code to be in a monospaced font, black, indented, and smaller than other text. I've tried to make a Style for this, but for some reason the Style never saves. :-( [edit: turns out I wasn't telling it to work on "new documents based on this template"]
Is there some way to put code in <pre> blocks or something that tells Outlook to ignore all these rules and format code the way I want it to? If not, what ways have you found to send code snippets in Outlook emails without it getting super annoying?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm programmatically sending HTML-formatted email, and setting the font as Arial throughout (font-family: Arial;). When the messages arrive in Outlook 2010, text in table elements is in Times New Roman. Text in div elements is fine in Arial. If I View Source, copy into an HTML file, and view in a browser, all fonts function as expected (it's all Arial).
Some Google results show that Outlook will fall back to its default font (Times New Roman) when none is specified, but that's not what's happening here.
Why is Outlook forcing my email to display in Times New Roman when specified otherwise?
Source: (StackOverflow)
I'm working on a windows client written in WPF with C# on .Net 3.5 Sp1, where a requirement is that data from emails received by clients can be stored in the database. Right now the easiest way to handle this is to copy and paste the text, subject, contact information and time received manually using an arthritis-inducing amount of ctrl-c/ctrl-v.
I thought that a simple way to handle this would be to allow the user to drag one or more emails from Outlook (they are all using Outlook 2007 currently) into the window, allowing my app to extract the necessary information and send it to the backend system for storage.
However, a few hours googling for information on this seem to indicate a shocking lack of information about this seemingly basic task. I would think that something like this would be useful in a lot of different settings, but all I've been able to find so far have been half-baked non-solutions.
Does anyone have any advice on how to do this? Since I am just going to read the mails and not send anything out or do anything evil, it would be nice with a solution that didn't involve the hated security pop ups, but anything beats not being able to do it at all.
Basically, if I could get a list of all the mail items that were selected, dragged and dropped from Outlook, I will be able to handle the rest myself!
Thanks!
Rune
Source: (StackOverflow)
I just wonder if it is possible to send Meeting Requests to people without having Outlook installed on the Server and using COM Interop (which I want to avoid on a server at all costs).
We have Exchange 2003 in a Windows 2003 Domain and all users are domain Users. I guess I can send 'round iCal/vCal or something, but I wonder if there is a proper standard way to send Meeting Requests through Exchange without Outlook?
This is C#/.net if it matters.
Source: (StackOverflow)
Because this is not the kind of company where wiki's are accepted, we tend to do a lot of communication through outlook. Sending code snippets through it is painfull.
Is there some way to get the markdown thing we have here, but in outlook?
Source: (StackOverflow)