VSTO – Importing addresses from Database to OUTLOOK

I am a fresh bee at VSTO concepts. I have been working on this since 4days.Out of my curiosity; today I tried a small example which will be useful in our office environment. Our Company has intranet portal which contains all the details about the employee. Every one updates their profile now and then in that portal i.e. Phone numbers, Designation, Manager Information, and Department. I want to be updated with the outlook contacts information. And also we need not bother about adding new employee Email information to our contacts. If any employee leaves the company, his/her Email id is no longer required. This is automatically taken care off by this application.

In this application we have two features. One is to IMPORT all the contacts. This is useful for the first time. And the second feature is for synchronizing with Outlook. If any information changes for an employee it will updates that info. If a new contact is found, then it will add that contact to outlook contacts while synchronizing.

Coding:

Step1:
Create a new VSTO project. Here I select OutLook 2007 addin.

Step2:
After creating the project I am creating a new connection to my database. Now add an .xsd file to my project. And drag the required table from your database to .xsd file.
 

Step3:
If you see your ThisAddIn.cs file, it has two basic methods.

Startup function is called when your application is opened and Shutdown is called when your application is closing.

What ever we want to write here comes into ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e).
If you see the above picture I am calling in two methods in Startup method. When ever application is starting I am removing my menubar and adding it again.

Step4:
Removing menu bar.

Here I am getting my popupmenu item from the currently active window. If it is not null then I am removing it.

Step5:
Now I am adding the menu item. First I am adding a CommandBarPopup. In this popup menu ,I add two CommandBarButtons.
This picture shows how to add CommandBarPopup.

This picture shows how to add CommandBarButton and also how to apply layout and button click event to this button.

Step6:
Here I am writing code for Import button click event. When this button is clicked I get the data from database and loops through all the outlook contacts. If it is found I delete it and add it again.

Step7:
In this step I am writing code for synchronizing the outlook contacts with DB details. Every thing is same as above step except, if the contact is found I am updating it with the DB details.

Step8:
Press F5. If you see your output..

Top Sync My Addresses is the CommandbarPop up. The below two are the CommandBarButtons.
Click on these buttons and see the contacts for output.

Here I am attaching the zipped code Download file (Open the link in IE). For any more clarifications please go through it.
Note: please change the downloaded file extension from .jpg to .zip.

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• Importing Contacts: A jumpstart into Zapproved
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