OSC Provider Development

The objective of this Hands-On Lab is to provide you with a foundation for developing your own Outlook Social Connector provider.

Overview

The Outlook Social Connector (OSC) is a set of new features that help you keep track of friends and colleagues while enabling you to grow your professional network. The OSC brings social views of your networks right to your inbox in a region known as the People Pane. As you read your email, you can view information in the People Pane such as the picture, name, and title of the sender along with a rich aggregated collection of status updates and activities related to the sender.

Because the OSC utilizes an open provider model, you can build providers that work with the OSC to display social network data. In addition to public social network sites, you can also use the OSC provider extensibility to build providers for line-of-business applications or internal corporate web sites and to integrate their services into Outlook.

In this Hands-On Lab, you will gain experience by learning about the basics of OSC provider development.

Objectives

The objective of this Hands-On Lab is to provide you with a foundation for developing your own Outlook Social Connector provider. In particular, you will

• Learn how to setup your development environment
• Build and debug a basic OSC provider
• Understand how to consume an OSC provider in Outlook

System Requirements

The tasks of OSC provider development depend on the specifics of your development environment. The steps in this Hands On Lab assume the following:

• Microsoft Outlook 2010 (32-bit)
• Microsoft Visual Studio 2010
• Microsoft Windows 7 (64-bit)

Setup

This Hands-On lab assumes that the Hands-On lab files are located in a folder named Student\OSC on the C:\ drive. If you haven’t already done so, perform the following steps

1. Open Windows Explorer
2. Right-click on the Local Disk (C:) item and choose NewFolder
3. Name the new folder Student
4. Right-click on the Student folder and choose NewFolder
5. Name the new folder OSC
6. Open up the zip file named OSC Hands On Lab.zip in the Lab’s %Office2010DeveloperTrainingKitPath%\Labs\OutlookSocialConnector\Source\Starter folder
7. Drag the items in the zip folder into the OSC folder

Exercises

This Hands-On Lab comprises the following exercises:

1. Setting up your Development Environment
2. Creating a basic OSC Provider
3. Consuming an OSC Provider in Outlook

Estimated time to complete this lab: 60 minutes.

Starting Materials

This Hands-On Lab includes the following starting materials.

• TestProvider Solution – This is the Visual Studio project you’ll use to start this exercise. It contains a sample OSC provider implementation that is ready to build & debug.
• SocialService Solution – This is a Visual Studio project that simulates a basic social service. In exercise two, you will modify the TestProvider solution so that it retrieves data from this service using the Windows Communication Foundation.
• MFCMapi.exe – MFCMapi.exe is a low-level tool for troubleshooting Exchange and Outlook. You’ll use this tool in exercise one to unhide a hidden Outlook folder.
• End Solutions\TestProvider – Completed Example.zip – This zip file contains a complete example of the TestProvider solution after modifying it to connect to the SocialService via WCF.