How to trigger an Outlook add-in outside of Outlook

Question

I have a Outlook COM add-in that is registered with Outlook to trap the Send event and examines the content of the message. The add-in examins the content to either allow it to be sent or reject the send. The COM Add-in is a standard VSTO add-in.

I would like to write a C# wrapper around this COM Add-in that will allow other processes to make use of this content scanning. My wrapper can load the COM Add-in but how do i go about triggering the event so that the COM Add-in fires? Would i actually have to use the Outlook Interop assembly to initiate the Send event inorder for the COM add-in to trigger? For the processes that are not Outlook i don't need to send the content, all i want to do is pass the content to the COM Add-in.

Can someone point me in the right direction or if this is even possible?

Answer 1

your COM add-in registers to the event raised by Outlook and contains the event handlers. COM add-in doesn't raise the send or any other Outlook events. So in order to trigger these events, you need to make use of Outlook Object Model. You can write an application using the Outlook APIs for this purpose.