Integrating pocket outlook and C# application

Question

Hello Folks,

I am hoping someone can help me by pointing in the right direction with a problem I have

I want to be able to create appointments using Outlook\Exchange server and sync those to my device using pocket outlook. On the device I want to be able to open the appointments application on the device, clicking on a menu option and pass the appointment details to another application (which I am writing also).

Any ideas? How easy is this to do and where is the best place to start looking for working how to pass data between outlook and my application? I've read the POOM section on msdn and think I can do the menu option but dont know the best way to tackle the integration. The Other application is written in C#.

Thanks

Morris

Answer 1

This sounds like you are asking more about inter-process communication between your pocket outlook plugin and your 'other' app. Given that you should be able to get the id of the appointment from the outlook plugin/menu item etc. then you can use a number of methods to pass that id to your other app, and then have it open the appointments collection and find the right appointment via POOM.

This could be as simple as sending your other app a windows message with the id as the LPARAM and use a messagewindow in your other app to receive the message. (Not sure if the id will fit in LPARAM though, WM_COPYDATA could be an alternative), however this approach needs some handshaking at the start to pass the window handles to each other.

You could use P2P (Point to point) message queues between the two processes, or tcp/ip sockets.

One other way could be for the pocket outlook plugin to mark the appointments with a custom property, and then just use a named event to signal to the other app to do it's thing, and it could find all the marked appointments via POOM and process them.