Accessing Exchange data with ADO, CDO and WEBDAV
Another cracking session here at Tech Ed. There are those of us who
feel miffed that there are so many good sessions, as we really can't find
the time to slope off to those tapas bars. It really is most inconsiderate
of Microsoft.
Anyway, back to session MSG306: 'Accessing
data in the Microsoft Exchange 2000 Store with ADO, CDO, and WEBDAV'. It
isn't as widely known as it should be that the latest version of Microsoft
Exchange makes all its data store accessible from the 'outside'. From a
non-developer perspective, this means you can check information in the
Exchange store by typing the location of the server, folder, and so on as
a URL. As developers, we can go further, and get at the same data from
programs using ActiveX Data Objects, Collaborative Data Objects, and
WEBDAV (Web Distributed Versioning and Authoring).
Charles Elliot gave an excellent session
showing this happening using Exchange Server, Outlook and Visual Basic.
You could tell that the audience could hardly wait to get out and try this
for themselves - the questions about the finer details were fizzing with
enthusiasm. Using ADO and CDO, Charles added folders, created contacts,
interrogated the information to find specific items by name. We saw the
code for creating custom items, and a whole section on programming with
WEBDAV. He then moved on to show querying the information using SQL Select
statements, opening up the option of tying Exchange and SQL Server client
apps closer together.
The possibilities just leap out, and the
sample code will be well worth looking over if you have anything to do
with programming against Exchange. Say goodbye to MAPI, things are finally
getting civilised.
Kay Ewbank
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Keynote comment: Jon Honeyball
speculates on the future of SQL Server
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