Yesterday (August 1 2012) I wrote a post about how to upgrade your old Hotmail account to Microsoft’s new Outlook.com this article also covered how to get your new MyEmail@outlook.com webmail address. However, I put the steps for upgrading your email address last in the article which isn’t very visible to people interested in upgrading. So in the interest of clearly explaining to people how to get your Outlook.com email address, here are the steps again:
How to get an Outlook.com Email Address
Microsoft has made it very straightforward for existing Hotmail users to upgrade their accounts to Outlook.com. Likewise they have also made getting your new outlook.com email address as painless as possible.
Microsoft announced recently (July 30 2012) that it is deprecating its Hotmail.com email service in favor of a new version called Outlook.com. This is part of Microsoft’s continued push to make its products more Web-based and integrated.
The best part is that you can now get an example123@Outlook.com email address to replace your old Hotmail address.
So What’s in Store?
Microsoft will continue to explore integrating social media with its products including Outlook.com email accounts. It’s my guess that this may involve more integration of Outlook.com with Microsoft’s experimental So.cl social media platform.
I’m a fan of the new Outlook.com service since Outlook has been Microsoft’s professional email software platform for many years now. So integrating the Web-based email service with the Outlook name just makes a lot of sense. As another plus, Microsoft intends to keep its new Outlook.com service free.
VSTO for MS Outlook can be a powerful way to customize Outlook programmatically. However, the syntax can be finicky at times and I have found a few instances where the programming logic becomes tricky.
For example, you can use VSTO to add a text box to the Outlook command bar window. This can be put to a number of good uses when building a custom component for Outlook. My thoughts behind adding the controls to Outlook were to allow the user to select a type of search to run in the custom dropdown list, and then to use the text box for the user to add text that the system would use to run a search on custom email fields.
In my case I wanted to add a textbox and a ComboBox to my main Outlook Explorer view. The VSTO controls in Outlook are called msoControlEdit and msoControlComboBox respectively.
At first glance adding a simple text box and dropdown list sounds like a simple requirement. But as I found out, this isn’t quite the case. The problem? Outlook by default will clear any entered text from the new text box when focus is lost. I’m not sure what the reasoning behind this is, but from reading help articles and forum posts, it appears that many people are coming up against the same problem.
As a positive, the ComboBox control does retain selected text, so we will not need to worry about handling this control.
For the convenience of readers of this article; I am including a full example of how to add a textbox and a ComboBox to the Outlook main command bar at the end of this article.
Justin Cooney 