New articles and more

If you've been watching the Outlook developer portal recently, as of last Friday you noticed some new technical articles went live.

My first MSDN article, "Code Security Changes in Outlook 2007" went live. This document discusses some of the changes around the object model guard and code security that we've made for Outlook 2007. It also includes a list of blocked/guarded members in the object model for 2007.

Also posted last week was the beta 2 version of our sample add-ins. These samples have all been updated to be fully compatible with Office 2007 beta 2, and are a great resource for learning about some of the new extensibility areas in Outlook 2007. Randy and I have both worked hard on getting these add-ins developed, tested, and ready for you to start taking a look at. However, there are a few known issues with some of the add-ins, but these issues will not prevent you from learning a great deal about new Outlook extensibility. These add-ins will be updated again around RTM to be compatible with the RTM version of Outlook 2007.

In other news last week, a new version of Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) was announced. The Cypress release, which should be available around the same time as the Office 2007 RTM, provides support for developing managed-code add-ins for some Office 2007 applications.

Also thanks to everyone who stopped by the VSTO booth in the green technical learning center last week at TechEd in Boston. It was great getting to talk with you about VSTO and your Outlook integrations, and learning more about your solutions!