I've had the dubious honour of working on a project customising Appointment and Contact forms for Outlook for a customer. A simple enough project - all they want is a couple of extra fields and some custom validation so that they can ensure smooth synchronisation between the data on Exchange and the data in their CRM package. Only thing is, customising Outlook forms is now pretty much "obsolete", so say the MS guys, so we've encountered a few problems.
The biggest problem surely has to be the fact that if you customise the contact form in Outlook, you'll immediately notice that all the form fields are in the wrong place. Yup - the default form that opens in design mode on Outlook 2003 is Outlook XP style - you can try it for yourself. All you need to do is click Tools | Forms | Design a Form... then select the Contact form from the list. Hey presto, the whole appearance of the form reverts to Outlook 2002 (the one that came with Office XP) style. Now, if you don't actually make any changes to that first tab, it'll probably open up in Outlook 2003 style, but as soon as you add fields, you have to then spend time trying to make the form look like the Outlook 2003 style form. Except without the pretty, curvaceous, gradient filled buttons. Grey is the new gradient...
Faced with a bug as big as this, we figured that the guys at Microsoft would have a fix for this - let's face it, it's pretty crap that you can't use Outlook 2003 style contact forms in design mode - someone must have reported this ages ago and fixed it. But no, apparently, the form that you get was "finished" before even Outlook 2002 was released, and no development has happened in that area since that point, so there's no guarantee that it's even a fully-functional 2002-style form! As a result, a lot of dev time has been spent on this project adding in bits and pieces of functionality that is abvailable out of the box on a standard contact form in 2003 to a form that'll never look or feel quite the same.
And at the same time, there's something _really_ depressing about the fact that I'm having to code in VBScript. I mean, sod the concept of data types, and forget all the joys of .NET - this is one hacky crappy language. Javascript is so much more elegant - and at least it looks a bit more like a proper language, but of course, the language for hacking around with Outlook forms is VBScript. And you have to add the code in a non-colour coded window that has no intellisense, and no auto-indenting. I actually like using good old Notepad from time to time, but when I need to do proper coding, I like to have a few mod cons around. The measly object browser and list of event handlers is, admittedly, better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, but this is just not pleasant.
So, comparing this work to the stuff I did down in Reading earlier this year, where I worked with .NET Beta 2 and some way out there advanced stuff that really stretched my mind, to this hacky world of the "obj" and the "var" - I never want to be thought of as an Office developer if this is the sort of stuff they enjoy. I guess there's always VBA... I'm sorry, I didn't mean to swear (did I mention that you can't have multiple VBA projects in Outlook? Try deploying a bunch of VBA code to a desktop that already has a bunch of macros in the ThisOutlookSession and it's just not a pretty sight, AND code that communicates between VBScript on a form and VBA is officially NOT supported by Microsoft, but I digress). Yes, yes, I know the new stuff with VSTO (Visual Studio Tools for Office) is fab and groovy, and that you can do loads with .NET these days, but that's not what customers are after. They want simple, easy to deploy, easy to maintain - and there's not much more simple than an .OFT file for an Outlook form.
[Listening to: Dreaming Your Dreams - Hybrid - Wider Angle Disc 1 (07:13)]