Customer Reviews

Professional CDO Programming

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(1)

 

 

Professional CDO Programming is an excellent guide to Microsoft's latest messaging API. CDO provides a simpler interface to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server that was previously provided by MAPI. CDO actually rides on top of MAPI and provides an object oriented interface that is usable from Visual Basic, C++, and ASP.

This book includes a History of CDO, along with links to find the latest CDO files on Microsoft's Web Page. Also included is documentation regarding newer versions of CDO included with Exchange 2000.

The book is chock full of examples, primarily in Visual Basic; but sections are included that are dedicated to C++ and VBScript/ASP.

This book spells out the good points and bad points of CDO. Current releases of CDO, while usable with other MAPI E-Mail sources, are still primarily geared toward Microsoft Exchange.

If you are using Exchange and Outlook and you need messaging integration with your Web and VB applications, this is the book for you.

This book describe's CDO programming very good. Many examples, and excelent as a reference. There is also a chapter about programming with CDONTS and ASP (Active Server Pages)

This book will give you and Inside Out of CDO. For any level you need this (NT simple mail, Exchange server programming, Outlook programming, etc.), you will most probably find the answer in this book.

You could almost re-create Outlook Web Access (OWA) with this book!

I also have the Professional Outlook 2000 book and the Professional CDO is a great match with the first.

Bottom line: Very complete.

While most of what you need to know about CDO programming is in this book, I found that the information could have been presented in a more friendly manner. Most of the examples seem to be spread out throughout several chapters, leaving you to do a lot of flipping back and forth to figure out fairly straight forward information. Quite frustrating. To be fair to the authors, I have found this to be the case with most of the books in the WROX library, so it is probably just the editorial style of the publishing company.

If you like the WROX style, you should be happy with this book.

This book covers CDO 1.2.1. It does not cover CDO for Windows 2000. I did not discover this until I bought the book. The project I was working on required CDO 2000, so the book was worthless to me.

I bought this book on the advice of a respected web site. I was disappointed. I fully understood that this book was printed in 1999. This was okay because I needed information on the "old" technology, which is currently available in the form of "Redemption" for Outlook (not by Microsoft.)

The author uses each chapter to build a sample application. For those of us trying to solve specific problems, this is a very difficult format to work with because you have to hunt through all of the VB events to actually see what's getting called. I primarily needed to create calendar and task items and I got very little useful information out of the book. There's very few places where the author just lists the few steps to do a particular task. I had much better success just looking for sample code on the Internet.

The book also spends quite a bit of time on C++. However, the C++ code is calling Extended MAPI, not CDO. There's some good information about gotchas about Extended MAPI programming and C++, but there's no information about programming CDO with C++. Given the title of this book, none of this made sense.

Anyway, 2/3rds of the book is in Visual Basic 6, which is effectively a dead language at this point. So my advance is as follows. If you are a beginner at Outlook programming and you don't mind working in VB6, this book might work for you. If you are a more experienced developer looking for "cookbook" solutions, look somewhere else.