Form regions offer many enhancements over traditional Outlook forms development:

• Customize the default page of any standard form.

• Add up to 12 extra pages to any standard form.

• Replace or enhance any standard form.

• Display custom UI in the Reading Pane and in Inspectors.

For more information, see Customizing Form Pages and Form Regions.

You can use the New Outlook Form Region wizard to design a new form region or import a form region that was designed in Outlook. Also, if you have a form region that you used in another Visual Studio Tools for Office add-in project, you can reuse your existing form region.

Creating a New Form Region by Using the Wizard

Adding an Existing Form Region to Your Project

The form region designer helps you to design the layout and appearance of a form region. You can drag managed controls to the surface of the designer, double-click controls to open event handlers, and set properties in the Properties window.

Note:
You can find properties that affect the way the form region appears in Outlook beneath the Manifest node in the Properties window.

The form region designer is available only if you select Design a New Form Region in the Select how you want to create the form region page of the New Outlook Form Region wizard.

There are three ways to open the form region designer:

• In Solution Explorer, double-click the form region code file.

• In Solution Explorer, right-click the form region code file, and then click View Designer.

• In Solution Explorer, select the form region code file, and then, on the View menu, click Designer.

The form region designer supports only managed controls. You cannot add native Outlook controls.

When you design in Outlook, you can add native Outlook controls to the form region. Native Outlook controls enable you to bind to Outlook data at design time. However, you cannot then use the form region designer to add managed controls or change the design of the form region.

You can import form regions into an Outlook add-in project by using the New Outlook Form Region wizard. On the Select how you want to create the form region page, select Import an Outlook Form Storage (.ofs) file. You can then browse to the location of an Outlook Form Storage file (.ofs) file. (Outlook saves form regions as .ofs files.)

The New Outlook Form Region wizard copies the .ofs file to the project directory and adds control references to the form region designer file. You can then handle control events in the form region code file.

To handle events in a Visual Basic project, select an event from the method name list at the top of the Code Editor. For more information, see How to: Create Event Handlers in the Visual Basic Code Editor.

To handle events in a C# project, subscribe to control events in the FormRegionShowing method. For more information, see How to: Subscribe to and Unsubscribe from Events (C# Programming Guide).

You can change form region properties in the InitializeManifest method of the form region factory class.

Updating an Imported Form Region's Design

The Microsoft.Office.Tools.Outlook namespace gives you access to classes that represent the form region, the Outlook item that displays the form region, and other useful items. The Outlook Form Region item automatically adds a reference to this assembly in the project and inserts the appropriate using or Imports statement at the top of the form region code file.

You can use classes, methods, and properties in the Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook namespace to accomplish most of your Outlook programming tasks. For more information about the Outlook object model, see Outlook Object Model Overview. For examples of typical tasks that make use of the Outlook object model in Visual Studio Tools for Office, see Outlook Solutions.

Handling Form Region Events

When you build an Outlook add-in project that contains a form region, Visual Studio Tools for Office adds the following information to the registry:

• A key for each message class that is associated with one or more form regions.

• An entry for each form region and an associated value that represents the name of the Outlook add-in.

Outlook uses this information to load the form regions.

You can debug an Outlook add-in that contains a form region just as you would debug other Visual Studio projects. When you start the Visual Studio debugger, Visual Studio Tools for Office automatically starts Outlook.

To view the form region, you must open the appropriate Outlook item. For example, if an adjoining form region is appended to the bottom of a mail item, open a mail item.

Form regions are deployed automatically with the associated Outlook add-in. Therefore, you do not have to perform any special tasks to deploy a form region. For more information about deploying add-ins, see Deploying Office Solutions (2007 System).

Tasks

Concepts