Now that I've made the switch to Outlook for my address book, I have been working on the export functionality for my home-grown XML-based distributed address book. I've got the export part working, using the Outlook Object model, from C#/.NET, and now just plugging in the last piece - calling the "export" functionality from an .aspx page.

Bam - brick wall !!

Apparently there are all kinds of problems using automation to drive Outlook from a service, web page, IIS, etc.

I guess I should have seen this coming. Not only is it unstable per the above document, but there are "profile" issues, etc. When trying to hit this from IIS, the account opening the Outlook session is not interactive, so it's probably prompting to create a new profile, etc.

I'm rethinking this now, probably going to just fallback to a nightly export job that lays the xml somewhere, and then a simple ASP.NET page to dish out the xml. Hmmm...maybe this can help in the "difference" issue too -- the nightly job can run a diff against the previous, and potentially not update the data if it's the same! :) So then I could get back to the "only return the data if it's changed" model.