Ben Reichelt’s Weblog

Its funny how writing can help you clarify your thoughts. I’m working
on a client application that integrates with Outlook 2003, and I was
getting frustrated with the Office api, as its definitely not as clear
or rich as the .net framework BCL.  For instance, I still don’t
know if there is a way to open a contact item by simply specifying its
EntryID, the unique id that is assigned to objects in Office; instead
you have to open a contact folder, and iterate over the items until you
find the one you want, it just seems like they went out of their way to
make it difficult.

But I digress, this is not meant to be a post that rips on the Office
api, because its actually really powerful and useful.  I sat down
to write a post a few days ago about how the Office api sucks and how
there are hardly any decent code samples, documentation, etc. 
Each time I tried to make a point of how the api sucks, however, I
found myself thinking “well its really not that bad, its just new to
me, and in actuality, its pretty good.”  So I found that I really
had no solid reason for hating on the Office api, and I changed my mind
about the whole thing.  To be perfectly honest, since I just
started this app this week, I’ve actually got a fairly good grasp on
the api after only a few days, which just reinforces the idea that the api is well thought out and intuitive.

So, thanks to the Office team for making it easy for me to integrate, I appreciate it