Accessing Outlook Address Book from VB.NET

Had someone ask me this a while back and lost the link so I decided to blog it this time. As always dont' forget to add a COM reference to your project for the Microsoft.Outlook x.0 Object library in order to create the necessary objects.

Dim oOutlook As New Outlook.Application
Dim oNS As Outlook.NameSpace
Dim oContacts As Outlook.MAPIFolder
Dim oItems As Outlook.Items
oNS = oOutlook.GetNamespace("mapi")
oContacts = oNS.GetDefaultFolder(Outlook.OlDefaultFolders.olFolderContacts)
' set to the contact folder
oItems = oContacts.Items.Restrict("[MessageClass] = 'IPM.Contact'")
' filter to select only contact items
oItems.Sort("[EMail1Address]", False) ' sort by email address

For Each oct As Outlook.ContactItem In oItems
  MessageBox.Show(oct.CompanyName & "-" & oct.BusinessTelephoneNumber)
Next