Chapter 5: Programming Outlook Using VBScript

Overview

In Chapters 3 and 4, you learned about folders and the form design tools that can assist you in developing collaborative applications in Microsoft Outlook. Outlook also 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 in the Outlook object library. VBScript also lets you automate applications, such as Microsoft Excel, inside your own application so you can take advantage of their functionality.

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

This chapter is not an extensive tutorial on VBScript, but it does provide you with enough information on the language to work through the examples in this book. For more information, check out the VBScript help file included with the book's companion content. It has a language reference section and a simple tutorial. Many great books published by Microsoft Press also cover VBScript in more detail, as do a number of Web sites, such as http://msdn.microsoft.com/scripting , which has up-to-date information on VBScript and offers VBScript- related files for downloading.

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.