What's New in Exchange Development

Exchange 2007 offers a new developer platform that replaces a hodge-podge of APIs built on aging technologies, such as COM, with a new set built on Web services and the .NET Framework. The overhaul makes it easier for developers to use Visual Studio to build applications that run on top of Exchange. But some APIs have been dropped and others are likely to be dropped from future releases, making it necessary for developers to rewrite some existing applications.

Why Develop on Exchange?

Originally conceived as simply an e-mail server, Exchange morphed and gained new features as Microsoft competed with products such as Lotus Notes. Along the way, Microsoft added a number of features and APIs aimed at turning Exchange into a broader platform for building collaboration applications. Some examples of applications that can be built on top of Exchange include the following:

• Systems that automatically provision e-mail accounts with predefined settings
• Desktop applications that display information