A new managed API for developing Exchange applications

Since Microsoft Exchange is the major messaging and collaboration platform I used from day to day, it’s good to know that you can also develop applications for this platform. Already years ago, I explored the possibilities of extending Exchange's features, and for example reading mail boxes and getting notifications of new e-mails. I shared the results in for example The Delphi Magazine in August, 2006, but back then, developing such applications was difficult, required the use of COM, and didn’t support managed code.

But with Exchange 2007, this has changed, as the major interfaces are new web services. This means that it's quite easy to access these from, say, .NET and C#. But, I say "quite", as the web services has been far from easy or intuitive to use. Surely, they work, but to get wide-spread development, these interfaces should be easier to use.

But now, Microsoft has released a managed wrapper around these interfaces, and that sounds great! One of the key design principles was to keep the interfaces easy to use, and this is exactly what I'd want to see.

So, if you are interested in developing solutions or applications for Exchange 2007 (or, the forth-coming Exchange 2010), then be sure to check out the new EWS Managed API (Exchange Web Services)!