Developing Exchange Online Solutions

Abstract

In this chapter you’ll create a client application that accesses the Exchange Online server in your Office 365 account. Exchange Online 2010 exposes a lot of features through Exchange Web Services (EWS) to client applications such as Outlook and Outlook Web App. Your custom application can use these same features as well. I will show you how to

• Connect to the Exchange Online server using the autodiscover process. The actual server that is hosting your Exchange instance can change, so you should always use the autodiscover process instead of hard-coding the connection string.

• Access the mailbox items stored in Exchange. Think of Exchange as a specialized database containing objects such as e-mails, appointments, tasks, and contacts, which are organized in a hierarchy of folders. You can view, modify, and create these objects programmatically.

• Determine the availability of someone or a group of people. Exchange provides a feature that allows you to see when people will be available based on their calendars. You can also use this feature to suggest windows of time when the specified group of people and resources will be available.

• Subscribe to notifications when certain events occur, such as the arrival of a new message. Your custom application can receive these notifications and take appropriate actions. I will show you both push- and pull-type subscriptions.