Adding custom pane to Outlook with VSTO SE

Today i am going to explain about Adding a new pane onto Outlook 2007. I searched MSDN articles for the same, but i never found a suitable one.

Prerequisites: To complete this walk-through, you will need:
1) Microsoft Visual Studio 2005
2) VSTO 2005 SE
3) Microsoft Outlook 2007

Start the visual studio 2005. Create a new project of type Outlook 2007 Add-in.

Visual studio automatically adds the deployment project for the add-in. You will be presented with a partial class called ThisAddin. It has ThisAddIn_Startup & ThisAddIn_Shutdown which occurs when your outlook addin gets loaded and unloaded respectively.

To add a Panel onto outlook is pretty straight forward.
1) Add a user control by right clicking on your Project.
2) Name the user control as TaskPanel
3) Now drag some controls from toolbox on to the user control like some textbox, radio button etc.

If you have followed my steps, your visual studio should appear like the one below.

 
Add these namespaces in ThisAddin.cs
using Microsoft.Office.Tools;
using Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
using Microsoft.Office.Core;

Add these global variables in ThisAddin Class.

Microsoft.Office.Tools.CustomTaskPane taskPane;
Outlook.Explorer explorer;

Replace your ThisAddin_Startup method by this one.

private void ThisAddIn_Startup(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
explorer = this.Application.ActiveExplorer();

taskPane = Globals.ThisAddIn.CustomTaskPanes.Add(new TaskPanel(), "Demo", explorer);
taskPane.Visible = true;
taskPane.Width = 245;

//You can set the docking position of the Panel
taskPane.DockPosition = Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoCTPDockPosition.msoCTPDockPositionRight;

//You can also restrict the docking position change.
taskPane.DockPositionRestrict = Microsoft.Office.Core.MsoCTPDockPositionRestrict.msoCTPDockPositionRestrictNone;
}

Replace your ThisAddIn_Shutdown by the one below.

private void ThisAddIn_Shutdown(object sender, System.EventArgs e)
{
this.CustomTaskPanes.Remove(taskPane);
this.Application = null;
}

Your ThisAddin class should be similar to this one.

Build and run your project. It opens the outlook and your panel should be displayed on right side of outlook.

If you think Visual studio has made it very much easy to deploy the add-in, Think again :)
Deploying the Add-in on another computer needs quite modification to the deployment setup project. Read Deploying VSTO using Visual Studio

You can download the project from Outlook Panel in VSTO