I am writing an Outlook add-in in C#.Net, and would like to put an entry box
and button for searching in my custom toolbar, similar to popular desktop
search programs.

CommandBarComboBox (both msoControlComboBox and msoControlEdit) only support
the Change event, which fires when the user presses Enter (or Tab?). The
field clears when focus leaves the edit box, which means that you can't put
a button to the right which fetches the text value from the entry box (I
think you get the previously-accepted value back).

So, I can understand if MSN Search can do things that we can't, because they
are Microsoft (http://toolbar.msn.com/). The Yahoo Desktop Search add-in
does not put a button on their entry box, probably because they can't figure
it out either (http://desktop.yahoo.com/features). However, Google Desktop
Search's add-in does put a button to the right of the entry box
(http://desktop.google.com/features.html#outlook).

How are they doing it? More importantly, how can I do it?!?

Michael

Hi Michael,

If you install for example the Google toolbar, you'll see there is a
buggy behaviour there too.
We have an article about how to solve this issue but it uses some
Win32/C++ knowledge since with the standard Outlook controls is not
possible:

Outlook Addin: Implements a tailored Textbox:
http://www.nektra.com/downloads.php

Hope this helps.


Regards,
Sebastian
--
http://www.nektra.com