Support for EquivalentAddins in Outlook Addin manifest - outlook

According to this article, support for the EquivalentAddins manifest element in an Outlook addin is coming soon. Is there an expected release date yet?

On the last Community call the Outlook dev team didn't specify the release date explicitly stating that a preview set will be available "soon". I suppose it will be released around the Build conference which will take its place in the end of May. Let's see when it goes live.

Related

See Pending Changes in Visual Studio

We use Team Foundation Server (now Azure DevOps) in conjunction with Visual Studio as our version control system.
I am our teams ssrs report developer and, unfortunately, sometimes throughout the course of my day I'll be working on multiple projects and will have a report checked out, however I'm unsure what changes I might have pending (it could be something actually valuable for production, or just something I was testing). Is there a built in way to compare pending changes to the code vs the current saved version?
Per Daniel Mann's excellent comment, the answer is very simple. Right click > Compare!

Outlook Add-in: deploying new version does not update in outlook

I am currently working on an existing office 365 outlook add-in.
I'm not using visual studio but eclipse on a mac.
I simply need to do some debugging to check the response of an api call, so I added my debug code and deployed the add-in on the hosted server.
Then, from the Office Admin Center I re-upload the add-in making it available to all users.
The original problem was that the updated version of the add-in did not update straight away in outlook.
I left it for a day and today outlook was serving the updated add-in but then I had to add some more debugging code and once redeployed the new add-in version again was not served in outlook.
Thinking it was a caching issue I deleted all the browser cache (Local Storage, Session Storage, Cache Storage).
Unfortunately since then the Add-in is not loading at all returning an Add-in error:
Uncaught Function ContextActivationManager_getAppContextAsync call failed. ErrorCode is -2, exception: Failed origin check
from outlook-web-16.01.js
I tried to re-deploy it updating the version in the manifest but still no success.
I cannot really afford to waste another day to wait for the new version to kick-in so I was wondering if there is a faster way? Am I doing something wrong in deploying the add-in? Is there a reason why uploading a new version of the add-in it doesn't get served straight away in outlook?
RESOLVED. Apparently there is nothing wrong with the add-in deployment. I have spoken directly to the outlook support team and they said that if you are using the outlook web app the plugin takes time to become available because it goes through a release process.
So either use the desktop version of outlook or wait at least half hour before the plugin finally becomes available.
The error I mentioned earlier looks like it is not related to the add-in deployment.

How do you get Internet Free/Busy to publish in Outlook 2013?

Our company has a shared network drive folder for everyone's Free/Busy .vfb files. I confirmed I have permissions to read/write to this folder.
I followed the directions to configure Outlook 2013 (32-bit version, running off Windows 7 x64) from Microsoft's Knowledge Base. I can see other people's Free/Busy information, but nobody can see mine. Outlook never publishes my .vfb file to the folder. Other employees with Outlook 2007 and 2010 don't have this issue.
Another person posted this problem that's very close to mine on another forum and I've tried the same troubleshooting steps. I'm experiencing the same "71 months" issue he's having as well. I've tried disabling the firewall and verified registry settings, but nothing is working. I even tried adding an older Outlook "UseLegacyFB" DWORD value but that didn't work either.
There's a bug in Outlook 2013. See this : http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/fr-FR/d265a5c6-9f99-410a-8862-a374de1b4144/freebusy-not-publishing-with-outlook-2013-without-exchange
This issue has been submitted to the Outlook Team for a fix but we do not have an estimated
release date yet. Once I get more information I will post back and update. When using POP
accounts the *.vfb file does not get created properly.

Create VSTO 3.0 Outlook Add In to run on office 2003/2007/2010(x32 and x64)

Is it possible to create an add in that works on all office versions?
I searched the msdn and different forums but there is nothing specific about this issue.
Difficult if you use VSTO, because you'll need to deploy/assure different runtime libraries. See the VSTO entry in Wikipedia, not to speak of different development and test platforms (which you may already have, if you aim for it).
There's a MSDN Blog from Mary Lee the migration of 2007 to 2010 projects.
Please see also this blog from Andrew Whitechapel: Can you build one add-in for multiple versions of Office?
From a pragmatical point of view ("time-to-market"), you may consider the use of a third-party-tool (www.add-in-express.com), which allows the creation of version-independent add-ins.

Outlook 2003 Addons

I want to create a custom Addon/plugin for Outlook 2003, to support integrated functionality with a task management system.
I am unable to find many good development resources for the same.
Can someone please explain Outlook 2003 architecure and development of a plugin.
Good links/resources are also welcome.
Here is a tutorial on outlook architecture getting started building Outlook 2003 plugins from MSDN:
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa289167.aspx
There is also a huge list of resources here: http://www.microeye.com/resources/res_tech_vsnet.htm
Good luck!
What you want can be done.
The bottom line is that you need to use Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2008 plus Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) plus Outlook 2003 (of course) to build an "Adddin" for Outlook.
Addins are quite complicated to write mostly because Outlook has eccentricities that are not well documented. For example, a method Outlook.MailItem.GetHashCode() is not always the same even for the same object despite what you might expect from something as seemingly absolute as a 'HashCode' for an object. Knowing that and many other quirks of the VSTO+Outlook API are for what the professionals get paid. There are MANY quirks. If you are learning then you will need to start with the resources Gdeglin has provided.
Also look at the MSDN VSTO forum:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/vsto/threads <- very active!
And Outlook code: http://www.outlookcode.com/
Also here is a Google search on MSDN for various VSTO 'tips'.

Resources