Professional CDO Programming

Rating:
Summary: Excellent CDO Programming Guide
Review: Professional CDO Programming is an excellent guide to Microsoft's latest messaging API. CDO provides a simpler interface to Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server that was previously provided by MAPI. CDO actually rides on top of MAPI and provides an object oriented interface that is usable from Visual Basic, C++, and ASP.

This book includes a History of CDO, along with links to find the latest CDO files on Microsoft's Web Page. Also included is documentation regarding newer versions of CDO included with Exchange 2000.

The book is chock full of examples, primarily in Visual Basic; but sections are included that are dedicated to C++ and VBScript/ASP.

This book spells out the good points and bad points of CDO. Current releases of CDO, while usable with other MAPI E-Mail sources, are still primarily geared toward Microsoft Exchange.

If you are using Exchange and Outlook and you need messaging integration with your Web and VB applications, this is the book for you.

Rating:
Summary: CDO Programming explained
Review: Started out with this book to understand the direction of Microsoft in the gradual move towards object model programming. CDO is meant to ease the "pain" of raw extended MAPI programming. However, there are some issues and cases that still required the ascent into the arcane area of raw MAPI. Examples are custom agent programming and Calendar programming(which is greatly undocumented) using raw MAPI. Correlating IDispatch and IUnknown Interfaces does not make it easier, and smart pointers are not a panacea for all programming issues. Enough said... I really love this book, and with the move to Exchange 2000, it should give a good foundation for CDO programming in both C++ and VB.

Rating:
Summary: CDO Programming explained
Review: Started out with this book to understand the direction of Microsoft in the gradual move towards object model programming. CDO is meant to ease the "pain" of raw extended MAPI programming. However, there are some issues and cases that still required the ascent into the arcane area of raw MAPI. Examples are custom agent programming and Calendar programming(which is greatly undocumented) using raw MAPI. Correlating IDispatch and IUnknown Interfaces does not make it easier, and smart pointers are not a panacea for all programming issues. Enough said... I really love this book, and with the move to Exchange 2000, it should give a good foundation for CDO programming in both C++ and VB.

Rating:
Summary: Doesn't cover CDO 2000!
Review: This book covers CDO 1.2.1. It does not cover CDO for Windows 2000. I did not discover this until I bought the book. The project I was working on required CDO 2000, so the book was worthless to me.

Rating:
Summary: Doesn't cover CDO 2000!
Review: This book covers CDO 1.2.1. It does not cover CDO for Windows 2000. I did not discover this until I bought the book. The project I was working on required CDO 2000, so the book was worthless to me.

Rating:
Summary: Programming CDO get's easy with this book.
Review: This book describe's CDO programming very good. Many examples, and excelent as a reference. There is also a chapter about programming with CDONTS and ASP (Active Server Pages)

Rating:
Summary: Become an Expert in CDO from scratch
Review: This book will give you and Inside Out of CDO. For any level you need this (NT simple mail, Exchange server programming, Outlook programming, etc.), you will most probably find the answer in this book.

You could almost re-create Outlook Web Access (OWA) with this book!

I also have the Professional Outlook 2000 book and the Professional CDO is a great match with the first.

Bottom line: Very complete.

Rating:
Summary: Become an Expert in CDO from scratch
Review: This book will give you and Inside Out of CDO. For any level you need this (NT simple mail, Exchange server programming, Outlook programming, etc.), you will most probably find the answer in this book.

You could almost re-create Outlook Web Access (OWA) with this book!

I also have the Professional Outlook 2000 book and the Professional CDO is a great match with the first.

Bottom line: Very complete.

Rating:
Summary: A little disjointed
Review: While most of what you need to know about CDO programming is in this book, I found that the information could have been presented in a more friendly manner. Most of the examples seem to be spread out throughout several chapters, leaving you to do a lot of flipping back and forth to figure out fairly straight forward information. Quite frustrating. To be fair to the authors, I have found this to be the case with most of the books in the WROX library, so it is probably just the editorial style of the publishing company.

If you like the WROX style, you should be happy with this book.