Just a quick notice, I just reinstalled my X301 yesterday (Due to SSD slowdown) and was planning on using OWA until the RTM release of Office 2010 (I have enough Beta software on my machine as it is).
Turns out that I didn’t have to wait that long ;-)
Developing the every day Line Of Business Applications (LOBA) often includes handling various types of information. When dealing with custom CRM system you often need to collect and bind typed data sources together. One of these sources is often emails but of its good features i.e. handling unstructured information is also its worst. Fortunately the Exchange Server 2007 SP1 and EWS api provides us with tools and handles to enable us to structure and categorize all types of information in a Exchange Mailbox Store. When making connections between two systems some patterns always emerge. The first is you need an unique item key from the source system to store in the destination system to make a one way connection. This strategy has a flaw because when the source item is deleted you need to remove the reference key in the destination. In this case people tend to delete items though outlook and not your LOBA and outlook does not contact you LOBA to tell you have to delete the reference. So the before mentioned strategy flaw was the tight coupling of information between the source and destination.
So let me suggest another solution. Lets say you what to connect you LOBA with a item from a Exchange Mailbox. Instead of storing the Exchange Item ID in you LOBA try instead tag the Exchange Item with the item id from you LOBA you want to connect with. Then from the LOBA, search the Mailbox for items tagged with the LOBA item id. In this way when some elements has been deleted you do not end up with lost keys because the search will not return items that has been deleted. For making this work we need to handle to things: Item Extended Properties and the ability to search for these items.
To illustrate how to work with extended properties I will make use of an email object and store it in the default Innbox
1: //Setup the request. es is an instance of ExchangeService
2: EmailMessage em = new EmailMessage(es);
3: em.Subject = "Hello World!";
4: em.Body = "Your base belongs to us!";
5: //Creating the Extended property CustomerID as a type of string
6: ExtendedPropertyDefinition epd = new ExtendedPropertyDefinition(DefaultExtendedPropertySet.Common, "CustomerID", MapiPropertyType.String);
7: //Give the property a value and assigning it to the email
8: em.SetExtendedProperty(epd, "1234");
9: // Store the message in the inbox
10: em.Save(WellKnownFolderName.Inbox);1: //Defining a view/windows into the search result.
2: ItemView view = new ItemView(50);
3: //Telling that i am only interested in the id of the item.
4: view.PropertySet = new PropertySet(BasePropertySet.IdOnly);
5: //Creating a extended property definition to search for.
6: ExtendedPropertyDefinition epdCustomerID = new ExtendedPropertyDefinition(DefaultExtendedPropertySet.Common, "CustomerID", MapiPropertyType.String);
7: 8: //Variable for storing the searchresult
9: FindItemsResults<Item> foundItems; 10: 11: do
12: { 13: //Search the inbox for at item with a extended property value stet to 1234
14: foundItems = es.FindItems(WellKnownFolderName.Inbox, new SearchFilter.IsEqualTo(epdCustomerID, "1234"), view);
15: foreach (Item current in foundItems)
16: {17: //Getting the email message from the Exchange Service via the item id.
18: EmailMessage email = EmailMessage.Bind(es, current.Id) ;19: Console.WriteLine("Message found. Subject: {0} - Body: {1}", email.Subject, email.Body);
20: }21: //Offset the index of the view/windows with 50. This gives the ablity to page through larger resulset.
22: view.Offset += 50;23: //while there more result available...
24: } while (foundItems.MoreAvailable);
The item id can still be very valuable for your LOBA. If you store the id in you LOBA you can always find the item again even if a user decides to move the message to another folder. By using the EmailMessage.Bind method with the item id you will always get the message returned. Same thing goes for folders they also have a id. So even if the users decide to reorganize the folders with the folder id you can still find the folder again.
For some time now developers have been able to access Exchange Server 2007 via Exchange Web Services(EWS). To get this working you basically added a webreference in Visual Studio and constructed a request pending upon the type of function you wanted to execute. EWS was a great step away from the various message api(CDO, MAPI, WebDaV) which had their own strength and weakness. But still EWS can be laborious and you often end up building your own stub upon the EWS webreference. Through my teaching of Developing for Microsoft Unified Communications R2 i got to know a new API called Exchange Web Services Managed API. In short this is the way – this is the api for programming for Exchange Server 2007 with sp1. In the next few blogs I will run through some of the basics for this new API. As a first sending a email would be a place to start.
Sending email with EWS(c#)
1: // Setup the request
2: MessageType emailMessage = new MessageType();
3: 4: // Set the To email address
5: emailMessage.ToRecipients = new EmailAddressType[1];
6: emailMessage.ToRecipients[0] = new EmailAddressType();
7: emailMessage.ToRecipients[0].EmailAddress = "email@receiver.somewhere";
8: 9: // Set the From email address
10: emailMessage.From = new SingleRecipientType();
11: emailMessage.From.Item = new EmailAddressType();
12: emailMessage.From.Item.EmailAddress = "email@sender.somewhere";
13: 14: // Set the Subject
15: emailMessage.Subject = this.textBoxSubject.Text;
16: 17: // Set the Body
18: emailMessage.Body = new BodyType();
19: emailMessage.Body.BodyType1 = BodyTypeType.Text;20: emailMessage.Body.Value = "Something to write about";
21: 22: 23: // Create request object and set properties
24: 25: // Create the CreateItemType in order to create and send the email
26: CreateItemType request = new CreateItemType();
27: request.Items = new NonEmptyArrayOfAllItemsType();
28: request.Items.Items = new ItemType[1];
29: request.Items.Items[0] = emailMessage; 30: request.MessageDisposition = MessageDispositionType.SendAndSaveCopy;31: request.MessageDispositionSpecified = true;
32: 33: 34: // Call CreateItem and process response
35: 36: // Finally, call the CreateItem method to create and send the email
37: CreateItemResponseType response = _service.CreateItem(request); 38: 39: // Analyze the response message for success/failure
40: ItemInfoResponseMessageType responseMessage = response.ResponseMessages.Items[0] as ItemInfoResponseMessageType;
41: 42: if (responseMessage.ResponseClass == ResponseClassType.Success)
43: success = true;
44: 45: MessageBox.Show("Email send succeeded: " + success);
Sending email with EWS Managed API(c#)
1: //Creating service binding for a Exchange Server 2007
2: ExchangeService es = new ExchangeService(ExchangeVersion.Exchange2007_SP1);
3: 4: //Assigning credentials for accessing the sender account
5: es.Credentials = new System.Net.NetworkCredential("sender@email.somewhere", "SuperSecret#1");
6: 7: //using autodiscover to find righ Exchange From End
8: es.AutodiscoverUrl("pli@inceptio.dk");
9: 10: //Creating a email message
11: EmailMessage em = new EmailMessage(es);
12: em.Subject = "Hello World!";
13: em.Body = "Using EWS Managed API";
14: em.ToRecipients.Add("receiver@emai.somewhere");
15: em.SendAndSaveCopy();Last night I was preparing some ideas for a demo application I need later this week. The demo app had to look good and should be fun and interesting in the making. So I decided to code the UI in Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). Code in XAML for WPF is simple and one will soon get the hang of it. So I went using some ListViews filled with data via LINQ to SQL and a data class. When I came to implementing Office Communicator 2007 functionality I realized that the “Microsoft Office Communicator 2007 Presence Controls” did only exists as Windows Forms User Controls and not as WPF user controls. Facing the choice of coding my own controls or try to make use of the existing Win Form controls I browsed around and found a XAML tag which enables you to host a windows forms control on a WPF page and the great part about it is really easy to use:
<Window x:Class="WPFHostingPresenceControls.Window1"
xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation"
xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"
xmlns:q1="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Samples.Office.UnifiedCommunications.PresenceControls;assembly=PresenceControls"
xmlns:q2="clr-namespace:Microsoft.Samples.Office.UnifiedCommunications.PresenceBase;assembly=PresenceControls"
Title="Window1" Height="300" Width="300">
<Grid>
<WindowsFormsHost Name="windowsFormsHost1">
<q1:PersonaList x:Name="plMyPersonaList"/>
</WindowsFormsHost>
</Grid>
</Window>
Here after you can populate the list via code:
public partial class Window1 : Window
{
public Window1()
{
InitializeComponent();
plMyPersonaList.AddRange("pli@inceptio.dk", "someone@inceptio.dk");
}
}
and when you compile you should have something like this.
So you have published your Exchange server and your are using forms based authentication (FBA). But when you use Outlook Anywhere or ActiveSync (MSRPC), it bypasses FBA. Why does it do that and how does that work?
Well, thanks to my coworker Claus-Ole Olsen, I got the question answered. ISA uses the User-Agent header/string to decide whether it will actually use FBA or not! You can also select different forms based on the value - for different device capabilities.
The ISA GUI tells you it uses FBA, but you just cannot trust that as the User-Agent header will modify the rule!
Read it all here on TechNet Microsoft Internet Security and Acceleration Server 2006 Managing User-Agent Mappings, including scripts for viewing and setting the values.
If you want to avoid the VBScript, you can use PowerShell. This is Get-IsaUserAgentMapping.ps1 -
param([switch]$pretty)
$root=new-object -com fpc.root
$isaArray=$root.GetContainingArray()
$mappings=$isaarray.ruleelements.UserAgentMappings |
select PersistentName,UserAgent,Description,Enabled,@{n="FBAFormsType";e={
# For values, see http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb794715.aspx
switch ($_.FBAFormsType) { 0 {"HTML 4.01"} 1 {"cHTML"} 2 {"XHTML-MP"} 3 {"Basic"} }
}},order
if ($pretty.isPresent) {
$mappings | Sort Order | Format-Table -auto UserAgent,Description,Enabled,FBAFormsType,Order
}
else {
$mappings
}
Adding and modifying is left as an exercise for yourself ;)
These are from the Office SP1 Whitepaper
Following are the KB articles referenced in the SP1 xls file
Find SP1 on Microsoft Update or at the download site.