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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-28T17:02:12+00:00

We are developing a small Outlook plugin using VS2010 / VSTO. It’s a new

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We are developing a small Outlook plugin using VS2010 / VSTO.

It’s a new thing for us so we’re wondering what’s possible and what’s not possible in an Outlook plug-in versus our more familiar Winforms stuff. So we’re making small piecemeal changes and checking frequently by running it in Outlook.

At the moment our change/test cycle works like this:

  1. In the Visual Studio IDE add, change, fix or extend the code in some small way
  2. F5
  3. Ding! Warning that Outlook is already running. Lose a life.
  4. Close Outlook
  5. F5
  6. Outlook starts, test the change

It’s the restarting Outlook that makes it so slow.

Is there any way to debug without restarting Outlook? Or, what would be even better, is there any way to debug-and-continue?

If not, is there anything at all we can do to make this bit of dev a touch more fluent/faster?

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    As far as I’m aware you can’t make code changes and continue debugging. You need to reload Outlook so that it loads in the new DLL. You could always write your own code that monitors a particular DLL and loads it in real-time, eg

    Assembly assembly = Assembly.LoadFrom("dllPath");
AppDomain.CurrentDomain.Load(assembly.GetName());
Type t = assembly.GetType("typeName");

    Then you can work on your DLL, modify the code and re-load the thing with outlook still running. Probably more hassle than it’s worth though.

    Outlook 2007 is very quick to start on my machine (but I’ve got a beefy i5 machine) – it literally takes 2 seconds to open. If your Outlook is really slow to startup, consider doing the following:

    • Remove all of the other addins that you’ve got installed in Outlook.
    • Is it possible that you can detach from your current mailbox and only have an offline one?
    • Detach from all of your other mailboxes
    • Install more memory on your machine so that everything is cached (cheap option, memory is very cheap these days)
    • Close down all other apps on your computer
    • Setup your mailbox so that it’s practically empty

    Is Outlook itself taking ages to load? (Eg for the initial splash screen to go away) Or is it chugging away after it’s opened?

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