Chapter 6 -- Programming Outlook with VBScript

Chapter 6

In Chapters 4 and 5, you learned about folders and the form design tools that assist you with developing collaborative applications in Microsoft Outlook. To help you further extend your applications, Outlook provides a built-in development environment that uses the Microsoft Visual Basic Scripting Edition (VBScript) programming language. Using VBScript, you can write procedures to manipulate items, folders, controls, and the other objects Outlook contains in its object library. VBScript also lets you automate applications, such as Microsoft Excel, inside your own application so that you can take advantage of their functionality.

The examples in this chapter are VBScript examples, as are many other examples in the book—Chapter 11 on Collaborative Data Objects (CDO), Chapter 12 on event scripting, Chapter 13 on routing objects, and Chapter 14 on Active Directory Services Interfaces (ADSI) are all interlaced with VBScript examples. By learning the VBScript language, you can easily use the different tools and APIs provided by Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook. This is the power of the Exchange Server platform: you need to learn only one language to develop applications in many different contexts.

While this chapter is not an extensive tutorial on VBScript, it does provide you with the requisite amount of information on the language to work through the examples in this book. For more information, check out the VBScript help file available on the companion CD. It has a language reference section and a simple tutorial. There are also many great books published by Microsoft Press that cover VBScript in more detail as well as web sites that provide excellent information. One web site in particular has up-to-date information on VBScript and VBScript-related files available for downloading: http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting.

You can, of course, use other development languages to create solutions that take advantage of Outlook, CDO, and the other Exchange Server tools. However, VBScript is integrated with the Outlook environment, and Outlook provides a number of great tools that take advantage of this integration.