Import/Export Outlook Contacts in ASP.NET

Integration in applications is quite often a requirement when building larger scale applications. With customers and clients using such a variety of productivity applications there is quite often a need to make use of these other applications within your own, which can cause a headache due to the complexity involved.

One of the more popular productivity suites in use is Microsoft Office. Customers more often than not will want a way to merge their productivity between applications such as Outlook, Word and Excel within your application, which is definitely no easy task.

Automation is often the answer in these situations, however Microsoft themselves say automation in an unmonitored environment is not even a supported feature, even though they provide the functionality.

Oftentimes developers are left to their own means, creating custom solutions for migrating data between all of the different applications involved in the equation. One of the most common applications used in integration situations is Microsoft Outlook. Clients often want the ability to integrate their existing contacts into your application's database, and vice versa. This is of course known as import/export functionality.

Using import/export functionality is the easiest method of integration in the case of Outlook because working directly with the Exchange repository is an incredibly complex daunting adventure.

In this tutorial we will explore a basic sample application which will accomplish 2 main tasks: Reading a list of contacts from an Access database which has been exported from Outlook, and importing a comma separated CSV file into the same Access database of contacts.

We'll be using the built in OleDb data classes for database connectivity and some fairly complex DataSet and DataTable manipulations to accomplish our importing from the CSV file.