CDO & MAPI Programming with Visual Basic:

Chapter 11. Web Applications

If you’re not yet familiar with Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) and Active Server Pages (ASP), it’s time to learn. IIS is web server software that runs on Windows NT. ASP is a technology built into IIS that executes embedded scripts (short programs) in web pages prior to the pages being transmitted to the web browser. The general goal of running ASP script is to create HTML content dynamically to be sent to the browser. Because script is executed entirely on the server, and because only HTML is sent to the browser, this technology supports all browsers.

ASP interests us here because it can create and manipulate CDO objects. This opens the door to creating web pages that allow the user to manipulate email, contacts, calendars, etc.—in short, anything that can be done in a standard application using CDO. In addition, Microsoft has provided the CDO Rendering Library, an object model specifically designed for reading data from CDO objects and generating HTML for displaying the data. While the CDO Rendering Library doesn’t do anything that can’t be done using ASP script, it’s nice not to have to write that script. (Note that occasionally in this chapter, and especially in code, I refer to the CDO Rendering Library as “CDORL” in the interest of brevity. This is not a Microsoft acronym.)

This chapter teaches you how to use CDO and the CDO Rendering Library on web pages using IIS and ASP. The CDO Rendering Library is rich. To fully explore it ...