How to: Send a Mail Item with an Electronic Business Card

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This example creates a mail item, looks for an Electronic Business Card, and if it finds one, inserts the Electronic Business Card into the mail item.

Example

To insert an Electronic Business Card, you can call AddBusinessCard on the MailItem object. This method takes a string representing an e-mail address and attempts to find a ContactItem with that address in the default Contacts folder. A ContactItem can have as many as three e-mail addresses. If the contact is found, the example calls the AddBusinessCard method, and then displays the message to the user.

If you use Microsoft Visual Studio to test this code sample, you must first add a reference to the Microsoft Outlook 12.0 Object Library component and specify the Outlook variable when you import the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook namespace. The Imports or using statements must not occur right before the functions in the Code section but must be added before the public Class declaration. The following lines of code show how to do the import and assignment in Visual Basic and in C#:

Imports Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook

using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;

Private Sub AddBusinessCard(ByVal eMailAddress As String)
    Dim mail As Outlook.MailItem = CType(Application.CreateItem( _
        Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem), Outlook.MailItem)
    mail.BodyFormat = Outlook.OlBodyFormat.olFormatHTML
    Dim contact As Outlook.ContactItem = _
        CType(Application.Session.GetDefaultFolder( _
        Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts).Items.Find( _
        "[Email1Address]='" & eMailAddress & "'" & " OR " & _
        "[Email2Address]='" & eMailAddress & "'" + " OR " & _
        "[Email3Address]='" & eMailAddress & "'") _
        , Outlook.ContactItem)
    If (contact Is Nothing) Then
        Return
    End If
    mail.AddBusinessCard(contact)
    mail.Display(False)
End Sub

private void AddBusinessCard(string eMailAddress)
{
    Outlook.MailItem mail = Application.CreateItem(
        Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem) as Outlook.MailItem;
    mail.BodyFormat = Outlook.OlBodyFormat.olFormatHTML;
    Outlook.ContactItem contact = Application.Session.
        GetDefaultFolder(
        Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts).Items.Find(
        "[Email1Address]='" + eMailAddress + "'" + " OR " +
        "[Email2Address]='" + eMailAddress + "'" + " OR " +
        "[Email3Address]='" + eMailAddress + "'")
        as Outlook.ContactItem;
    if (contact == null)
    {
        return;
    }
    mail.AddBusinessCard(contact);
    mail.Display(false);
}