Creating Outlook Calendar Appointments

I was just reading through Dan Fernandez’s blog and came accross a very interesting article for any of you who work in an environment where MS-Office is prevalent.  Though there are many ways to interface and interact with Outlook with .NET products, here is a very short tutorial which demonstrates how to create Outlook calendar items by using a simple flat file.

The example itself is quite simple, by generating a .vcs file that a user can click on, any web-based application can create calendar items.  Here is a sample of the VCS file format:

BEGIN:VCALENDAR
BEGIN:VEVENT
DTSTART:20060314T163000Z
DTEND:20060314T173000Z
SUMMARY:Product Launch GO/NOGO
LOCATION:Conference Room - F123, Bldg. 002
DESCRIPTION:The GO/NOGO decidion for the launch of our newest product takes place on Tuesday. Bring all of your action log items, and completed TPS reports with you. Johannes and Louisa will co-chair this meeting.
END:VEVENT
END:VCALENDAR

Armed with this knowledge it should become even easier to implement Outlook calendar appointments in your solutions.

Sources: Dan Fernandez’s Blog, IMC RFC 2445

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3 Responses to “Creating Outlook Calendar Appointments”


  1. 1 Bolart Jun 28th, 2007 at 11:12 pm

    how to avoid the anomalous code when create a calendar.
    such as in ‘SUMMARY’, if i input chinese, the calendar display anomalous code ,thx!

  2. 2 Bolart Jul 3rd, 2007 at 10:33 pm

    another problem, if the ‘DESCRIPTION’ has code ‘\n’ , can not
    open the appointment correctly.
    how to avoid the problem? thanks

  3. 3 Keith Jul 3rd, 2007 at 11:00 pm

    TO be honest, I’m not sure how to help you. I’ve looked for answers on this a couple of times since your initial comment and I’m not completely sure how to help.

    The only thing I can think of is to create a calendar entry with the features you want and export it to a VCS file. It may yield the answers to your queries. If I get a chance in the next few days, I’ll try it and upload the file here.

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