Also forgot to add before i have a post which points to MSDN on howto use the Microsoft outlook library. check it out http://shaunakpandit.wordpress.com/2008/10/06/programming-outlook-2003-in-c-using-outlook-shaunak-pandit/

For your requirement instead of using the .ics file approach you will have to create and utilise Microsoft Outlook object library objects.This will provide you the functionality that you require.

Cons:

1) Outlook needs to be installed on the server
2) After Service PAck2 the security features have been increased requiring manual intervention of granting access to the code to utilise the outlook objects.

Please help me, Same requirement for me also.
My requirement appointment/meeting request, it appears directly in Outlook calendar as accepted, without the user having to open the attachment and accept it,
Please guide me

Its urgent
Advance Thanks

Jenkins

May 13, 2009 at 9:45 am
Hi,

Do you know if it’s possible to send the appointment/meeting request in a way that it appears directly in Outlook calendar as accepted, without the user having to open the attachment and accept it?
I guess sending the ics file as attachment wouldn’t work for this problem…

Thanks,

Yes for such a requirement you will have to use the outlook object library to connect to the outlook profile and send the meeting invite.

In the above approach one doesnt need a outlook s/w installed on the server as long as one has the SMTP setup.

Yup thats another possibility you have brought forward to the subject thanks for sharing a file free approach

Very handy piece of code! Thanks so much for putting this up.

I found one place to make an (optional) enhancement and figured I would share.

Instead of actually writing out a file to disk, you can create the attachment directly from the vCalendarFile string. The System.Net.Mail.Attachment class has a static method called CreateAttachmentFromString(). So instead of:

FilePath += “\\” + Subject + “.ics”;
TextWriter tw = new StreamWriter( FilePath );
tw.WriteLine( vCalendarFile.ToString() );
tw.Close();
Attachment attachment = new Attachment( FilePath );
mail.Attachments.Add( attachment );

You can simply use:

mail.Attachments.Add( Attachment.CreateAttachmentFromString( vCalendarFile, Subject + “.ics” ) );

Obviously some people may want to have a copy of the attachment on the server but this worked perfectly for my application.

Thanks again!

Do you know if it’s possible to send the appointment/meeting request in a way that it appears directly in Outlook calendar as accepted, without the user having to open the attachment and accept it?
I guess sending the ics file as attachment wouldn’t work for this problem…

Thanks,
rodnas

i m facing the same problem with appointment calenar using asp.net can u please let me now what is the solution.

I am not sure what you mean by free time? if by free time you meaning keeping the meeting open?

See basically the code above is a tweak for generating the ics file thru code using a template… we can play around with the values inside the template to change the meeting the way we want.. try tweaking the values of time etc…

or else do it through outlook first then save that meeting as an .ICS file and open in notepad to check the contents and use them in your code…