This is ideal for situations where you’d want to call a web service to check the users’ license etc. If you are not using any Outlook objects you can always kick off a background thread to do the work for you. It is a good idea to defer long running processes to another part of your add-in to avoid it being disabled by Outlook 2013’s strict policies.
#ICLOUD OUTLOOK ADD IN PROBLEMS CODE#
The AddinInitialize is a tempting place to put code that checks for numerous things e.g. Slow start-up: This add-in caused Outlook to start slowly This add-in caused Outlook to open items slowly.This add-in caused Outlook to switch folders slowly.This add-in caused Outlook to close slowly.This add-in caused Outlook to start slowly.So let’s have a look at how you can avoid the dreaded Red Bar of Slowness and “A problem was detected with an add-in…” in Outlook 2013: If your add-in misbehaves and on average takes longer than one second to load, Outlook will disable it and show the user a notification with which they can choose to always enable the add-in or keep it disabled… just imaging those support calls! The same goes for the other criteria, your Outlook plug-in gets five strikes and it’s out. Outlook does give each add-in a fair chance, however, by using the average start up time over five consecutive iterations i.e. The new Outlook performance monitoring criteria include: It does not help your users’ confidence in your plug-in if they see this horrible red bar and realise just how much time your add-in took from their lives, by having to wait for it to perform its function.
Speaking for myself, I would not like this to happen to my Outlook add-ins.
If you do have a few misbehaving plug-ins, you might also have seen this new information bar when starting Outlook 2013 “A problem was detected with an add-in and it has been disabled”.Ĭlicking on the “View Disabled Add-ins…” button shows you a form with all the slow add-ins as well as exactly how slow each add-in was with a Red Bar of Slowness: “These add-ins decreased performance or caused Outlook to start slowly”. If you’ve read my last article What’s new in Outlook 2013 for developers, you would’ve seen I mentioned that Outlook 2013 has become a lot stricter when checking add-in performance for such metrics as add-in start-up, shutdown, item open and folder switching.