About CDO

Anyone who has been using MAPI at least once might have noticed that it is not a simple thing to handle. One of MAPI problems is its steep learning curve. It is necessary to spend many months learning MAPI before you can use it effectively.

There is one alternative to it if you develop messaging or collaboration client applications (not providers). It is called Collaboration Data Objects (CDO). With CDO you can e-mail enable your applications with less pain.

CDO is built on top of MAPI. Thus, it inherits a few things from it, such as sessions (you need to logon to underlying MAPI through CDO and obtain a session). A developer who is familiar with MAPI may easily see relationships between MAPI and CDO methods. In general, CDO is supposed to simplify "die-hard" MAPI programming.

You can read about CDO in MSDN Library. The section named "Collaboration Data Objects" would be logical place to start. It contains detailed documentation about CDO, and a lot of sample code written in Visual Basic. If you use Visual Basic as your development environment, you may benefit from taking these samples as your starting point.

One of interesting aspects of using CDO is the possibility to call CDO methods from Active Server Pages through Visual Basic Script commands. This allows for extension of your Exchange server or other MAPI applications to the World Wide Web.

I have chosen to use Visual C++ development platform for most of the samples in this book. I will use Visual C++ instead of Visual Basic in this chapter as well to make things consistent. I hope this will have a beneficial impact because there seems to be a lack of C++ CDO samples in MSDN library.

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