Gathering contact information from BCM programmatically??

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G

Guest

Hello,

I'm looking into a project to create a addin for Outlook which would allow
users to cache BCM contact folders to make them available offline. My
question starting out though can somebody tell me using C# or vb.net, if I
create an addin and try to access the BCM folders, will outlook return the
contact data back to me as it does when you make a call to get the contacts
in the Outlook default contact folder?

If it doesn't work the same way, can anybody tell me if there is an object I
can use to get the contact info returned?

Thanks.
 
Thank you very much Luther!

If you don't mind my asking, I checked out your blogs and I'm curious as to
where you got your information pertaining how to work with BCM.

Thanks.
 
BCM runs inside of Outlook, so the Outlook APIs by and large work with
BCM objects. Once you create a BCM object through Outlook, you can
iterate and print out all the properties. They pretty much match what's
on the screen in the Outlook UI. The tricky thing is figuring out what
the names of the BCM folders are in order to access them through the
Outlook OM.

mdsn.microsoft.com has manuals and explanations of how to work with
Outlook, and most things there apply to BCM too.

The BCM data is stored in an MSDE database. You can look at the tables
and views and compare the data there with what's in the Outlook OM.
There are also stored procedures in the database that give you some
insight into the way things are supposed to work.

With the above, most of the data should be understandable. For the
tricky bits you can decompile the BCM DLLs. They are written in managed
code and there are tools available for generating source code from
intermediate language stored in the DLLs. However, this can get pretty
tedious. There's a lot of code, and the generated source code doesn't
have the orignal variable names, so this is usually a last resort to
figure out really important items. The DLLs also store all the strings
used by BCM. These are useful when you need to know what something is
called (e.g. the BCM folder names) when you are trying to call it
through the Outlook OM. I expect that if BCM gets more popular, and
companies start trying to write 3rd party utilities for BCM, Microsoft
will document these names, but right now it's not worth their time.
More people are asking for other features.
 
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