Outlook Add-in: It's staying on add-in list, but how can I stop the delays when reopening the calendar

Question

We have a Outlook add-in, that is written in C#, that is working fine, and opens in the calendar view. The add-in is set to "Load at Startup". When someone is using another screen and then selects the calendar button, there is a significant delay and Outlook shows as "Not Responding".

I would like to keep the add-in loaded so that no delay is necessary.

Thanks for any help.

P.S. we are using .NET Framework 4.5.2

Answer 1

Without looking at the code it is almost impossible to say the reason why users may experience any delays. I'd suggest looking at the Explorer.BeforeFolderSwitch, Explorer.FolderSwitch and Explorer.SelectionChange event handlers in the code of your add-in. All of them are fired when a calendar is opened in Outlook.

To understand better what is going on in the add-in and could cause the delay I'd suggest adding any logging mechanisms to the code. You may consider using the log4net which is a tool to help the programmer output log statements to a variety of output targets. In case of problems with an application, it is helpful to enable logging so that the problem can be located. With log4net it is possible to enable logging at runtime without modifying the application binary. The log4net package is designed so that log statements can remain in shipped code without incurring a high performance cost. It follows that the speed of logging (or rather not logging) is crucial.

When you get logs from a problematic machine you may analyze them and find a possible cause.