Tag Archives: color

Converting OLE_COLOR to System.Drawing.Color

I’ve been working on a project using Visual Studio Tools for Office 2008 (VSTO) and at one point I needed to get the colors for categories in Outlook 2007. There are actually 3 colors, and they are returned as uint’s–why the .Net wrappers don’t convert to colors for you, I don’t know (to avoid linking to System.Drawing?).

The important thing is to convert them into the friendly System.Drawing.Color objects I know and love. For this task, there exists a handy ColorTranslator class. There is a FromOle method that does the exact chore you need. Here’s a sample of my code:

 

   1: private void GetCategoryColors()
   2: {
   3:     foreach (OutlookLib.Category category in
   4:         Application.ActiveExplorer().Session.Categories)
   5:     {
   6:         CategoryColor color = new CategoryColor(
   7:             ColorTranslator.FromOle((Int32)category.CategoryGradientTopColor),
   8:             ColorTranslator.FromOle((Int32)category.CategoryGradientBottomColor),
   9:             ColorTranslator.FromOle((Int32)category.CategoryBorderColor));
  10:         _categoryCollection[category.Name] = color;
  11:     }
  12: }