Searching public Outlook contacts folder from C#

Question

We have a large public contacts folder in Outlook called Global Contacts, I'd like to be able to search through it and return a number of results that match certain criteria, ideally wildcard-style.

E.g. if someone puts "je" in the 'name' textbox, it will return all contacts whose names contain 'je'. This may be coupled as an AND with a companyname textbox.

Most of the examples I've seen are either in VB, or are concerned with doing this form a web app - I'm doing a winforms app, and every machine has Outlook 2002 installed (yeah, I know, update long overdue).

Can anyone point me in the right direction? Some code would be nice as a place to start.

Cheers

Answer 1

I ended up doing this:

            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook._Application objOutlook; //declare Outlook application
            objOutlook = new Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Application(); //create it
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook._NameSpace objNS = objOutlook.Session; //create new session
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder oAllPublicFolders; //what it says on the tin
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder oPublicFolders; // as above
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.MAPIFolder objContacts; //as above
            Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook.Items itmsFiltered; //the filtered items list
            oPublicFolders = objNS.Folders["Public Folders"];
            oAllPublicFolders = oPublicFolders.Folders["All Public Folders"];
            objContacts = oAllPublicFolders.Folders["Global Contacts"];

            itmsFiltered = objContacts.Items.Restrict(strFilter);//restrict the search to our filter terms

Then just looping through itmsFiltered to add it to an ObjectListView. Hopefully this will be of use to someone else looking to do the same - it took me a while to cobble this together from various sources.