Trying to Programmatically Create & Open a new Outlook Email

Question

I have a winforms application and I am trying to create a method that will create and open a new Outlook Email. So far I have ``` private void CreateOutlookEmail() { try { Outlook.MailItem mailItem = (Outlook.MailItem) this.CreateItem(Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem); mailItem.Subject = "This is the subject"; mailItem.To = "someone@example.com"; mailItem.Body = "This is the message."; mailItem.Importance = Outlook.OlImportance.olImportanceLow; mailItem.Display(false); } catch (Exception eX) { throw new Exception("cDocument: Error occurred trying to Create an Outlook Email" + Environment.NewLine + eX.Message); } } ``` But the 'CreateItem' reference is underlined with the error message "does not contain a definition for CreateItem" I thought 'CreateItem' was a standard method for MS Office items, but admittedly I did find the above code on another website and simply copied it. What am I misunderstanding please?

Accepted Answer

Think about it. You are calling the `CreateItem` method on `this` current object. Have you defined the `CreateItem` method in this class?

Instead of your:

```
Outlook.MailItem mailItem = (Outlook.MailItem) this.CreateItem(Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem);
```

You need the lines:

```
Outlook.Application outlookApp = new Outlook.Application();
Outlook.MailItem mailItem = (Outlook.MailItem) outlookApp.CreateItem(Outlook.OlItemType.olMailItem);
```

You create an instance of the outlook application, on which you can call the `CreateItem` method.

Edit

There are two more things to make this work properly.

1) Add a reference to the `Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook` package to your project

2) Ensure you have the appropriate using statement in your class

```
using Outlook = Microsoft.Office.Interop.Outlook;
```

Trying to Programmatically Create & Open a new Outlook Email

Solution

Problem