If you read this blog regularly, I usually try to tackle relatively big topics and wax philosophical on any number of topics, thus the tag line "A Shotgun Approach to architecture." But this post will be different in that I'm actually providing some useful, hands-on information. Imagine that, from an architect even.

I've been talking to audiences a lot lately about building customer applications, or add-ins, for Microsoft Office using Visual Studio 2008. In this vastly expanding world of software plus services, Office stands as an excellent example of extending the base functionality of an existing piece of software to meet individual user needs in an environment that is instantly recognizable and comfortable for them.

Installing add-ins for Outlook 2007 using Visual Studio 2008 is a piece of cake -- simply code, build and deploy. In fact, your add-ins are installed into Outlook as part of the debugging process as well.

While this is cool and simple to use, it can have some undesired results, like having half finished or abandoned projects sitting in Outlook throwing errors every time you read or compose email. I actually ran into this problem this last week after doing some demos at the Windows Server/Visual Studio/SQL Server 2008 product launch in Kansas City.

I quickly discovered that there is no automatic way to uninstall these add-ins once they're installed, at least none that I was able to find. Ultimately, I discovered how to remove them and it requires a simple trip into the Windows registry ( oh joy!).

First, you'll need to open the registry editor and drill down to HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\Outlook\Addins. When you open this key, you'll see a list of sub-keys, each of which represent an add-in for Outlook.

Simply find the key for the add-in you wish to uninstall and delete it. You will, of course, need to restart Outlook for the change to take place.

And the good news is that the process is identical for Word and Excel as well.

Hopefully add-in management will be better integrated into Office in future version. For now, this simple process should get you where you need to go.