CDO & MAPI Programming with Visual Basic:

Preface

I wrote this book because I was unable to find an in-depth book on MAPI and CDO for Visual Basic developers. This was perplexing to me because the need to build messaging technology into applications is not at all uncommon. Many developers, for example, find that their applications must send email messages in response to certain events. Even this simple task can be difficult to get working without a good roadmap. I wanted to write a book that would be that roadmap.

Besides teaching how to send and receive email, I wanted much more. MAPI and CDO are powerful technologies that provide the infrastructure for sophisticated collaboration and workflow applications. This book teaches you how to exploit that infrastructure.

Web applications, too, can take advantage of the power and flexibility of MAPI and CDO. Microsoft even provides a server-side helper component (the CDO Rendering Library) that turns CDO data into browser-ready HTML. Sadly, the documentation in this area is poor. This book shows you how to get this capability up and running on your web site.

Who This Book Is For

The book’s primary audience is intermediate to advanced Visual Basic developers who have real-world applications to write. Beginning developers may feel lost during the technical discussions of MAPI, CDO, COM, and object models, but they still stand to gain from the sample code. I have provided numerous code listings to illustrate the concepts and capabilities discussed in the book. All of the code listings were tested within the Visual Basic development environment and copied directly from that environment into the text.

This book does not attempt to provide a complete reference for every MAPI and CDO object, property, and method call. Rather, the book approaches the topic from the point of view of a developer who has a job to do, or who wants to learn the material in a logical progression of concepts. Objects, properties, and methods are introduced as appropriate to the task under discussion.