Weekly Roundup: April 1, 2011 – No Fooling Edition
First of all this is NOT and April fools joke! This blog actually isn’t dead! Recently (almost a year ago) I switched out of my role in support to a consulting based role working with ISV partners. A bulk of my work is still Exchange and Exchange Online related but a good portion of it is also other things like Windows Phone, Azure, SharePoint, and Lync. Because of that the topics on this blog may start going outside the bounds of Exchange and Outlook development but that’s okay, right?
Weekly Roundup? The plan here is to aggregate interesting topics and articles I’ve come across in the week of work. I’m aiming to do this most Fridays in series I’ll call the Weekly Roundup. Mostly short descriptions with links - easy for me and to the point for you.
Microsoft Exchange RPC Extractor Whether you are doing protocol level work with MAPI, using either Outlook or Exchange’s MAPI provider in a service application, or even writing add-ins for Outlook this tool can be very useful for debugging issues or even learning about how your application communicates with Exchange. From the announcement post on the Exchange API-spotting blog:
The Exchange Interoperability Team is excited to announce the initial release of the Microsoft Exchange RPC Extractor (RPX). RPX is a command-line tool that can parse network captures and interpret remote procedure calls (RPCs) made from a client to Microsoft Exchange Server. RPX uses the information provided in the Microsoft Exchange Server protocol documentation to parse RPCs, remote operations (ROPs) and the parameters for each ROP.
Programming with Exchange Online The Exchange team launched an MSDN landing page devoted to development against Exchange Online as part of Office 365 and BPOS. This is a very important topic and it is important to understand what is and isn’t possible (come back next week for more detail on that topic). The landing page is pretty barren right now outside of a link to one article about using EWS with Exchange Online. Come back to their landing page soon for a series of content on Exchange Online.
Exchange Online vs. Exchange 2010 Again more discussion about Exchange Online, specifically comparing features between Exchange Online in Office 365 (which is based on Exchange 2010) and Exchange 2010 running on-premises. The Office 365 blog has a post from Jon Orton discussing some of the differences at a high level. An important link in the article is to the Office 365 Exchange Online Beta Service Description. This is important to read and I will highlight some key parts in a post next week.
Migrating from an Exchange Client Extension (ECE) to an Outlook add-in On the Outlook integration side the move from Exchange on-premises to Exchange Online thankfully has little impact. However, moving from Outlook 2007 to Outlook 2010 is a different story for some folks. In Outlook 2010 we cut support for the old Exchange Client Extension (ECE) interfaces completely. Steve has a follow up post with some great information on how to manage the transition from ECEs to Outlook add-ins.
Outlook, MAPI, and Virtualization Some great information here if you have a MAPI application utilizing Outlook’s provider and your customer is virtualizing Office applications using App-V and Click-to-Run delivery mechanism. The Outlook team has a post describing how to check the registry to see if Outlook is virtualized. If you need to use MFCMAPI on a machine with virtualized Outlook, read Steve’s blog post for tricking it into running along side Outlook in the virtualized environment.
April 1st 2011 Release of MFCMAPI => MFCMAPI.NET Not much more to say just get to Steve’s blog and check out the amazing update for his MFCMAPI tool.
That’s about all for now…