Outlook 2010 ignores VALARM of Web calendar (ICS) generated by my application

Question

Hello,

My web application (ASP.NET MVC) exports ICS calendar (webcal://host/calendar.ics), which I'm testing with Outlook 2010 and 2007 now. Apparently, no matter what, VALARM section of the calendar is being ignored by Outlook altogether and no reminder is being set at all:

BEGIN:VALARM
TRIGGER:-PT30M
ACTION:DISPLAY
DESCRIPTION:Reminder
END:VALARM

Is this some known issue or there's a right way to generate ICS to be consumable by desktop clients?

Thanks!

Answer 1

1. Add the calendar as a alternative view with a content type of text/calendar
2. Make sure this calendar view is ADDED LAST because order of alternative views is significant.
3. create text/plain and text/html views from message body, add calendar view, and then set the message body to string.empty. Otherwise the message body may override the calendar view in some way.
4. Also send the email to your gmail account. Gmail has a "show original" option which allows you to view the full text of the original email.