Glen's Exchange and Office 365 Dev Blog

This is part 2 of my MKR1000 article, in this previous post  I looked at sending a Message via EWS using Basic Authentication.  In this Post I'll look at using the new Outlook REST API  which requires using OAuth authentication to get an Access Token. The prerequisites for this sketch are the same as in the other post with the addition of the ArduinoJson library  https://github.com/bblanchon/ArduinoJson  which is used to parse the Authentication Results to extract the Access Token. Also the SSL certificates for the login.windows.net  and outlook.office365.com need to be uploaded to the devices using the wifi101 Firmware updater. To use Token Authentication you need to register an Application in Azure https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/office/office365/howto/add-common-consent-manually  with the Mail.Send permission. The application should be a Native Client app that use the Out of Band Callback urn:ietf:wg:oauth:2.0:oob. You ...

The Internet of Things is all the rage these days and one of the most popular prototyping platform for any electronic projects these days is the Arduino. The new MKR1000 Arduino board combines the functionality from the Zero board with a WifiSheild on a compact board and pretty cheap $35. It looks like These boards are pretty cool and take you back in some ways to 80's with some of the programming challenges that come with memory restriction devices. Eg the MRK1000 has 32Kb of SRAM which is half that of Commodore 64 although it runs at 48Mhz vs the 1.33 Mhz the Commodore could manage (I know this isn't a fair technical comparison just trying provide a bit of contrast). The nice thing with this board also is because it implements a cryptoauthentication chip  it can do SSL communication which can be problem with low power boards because of the amount of processing power required for SSL. So at the bare bones this board can run c...

One of the most basic things you might want to do with EWS is Send a Message, while its may sound easy sending messages programmatically can be at times confusing. But first lets take one step back for a second from EWS and look at the different ways you could send Email programmatically on Exchange. SMTP : (Simple Mail Transfer Protocol) SMTP is the backbone protocol for Email and is how most Email is transferred between servers on the Internet. Its also the protocol POP and IMAP clients use to send email. Because SMTP is a protocol (meaning its a set of rules defined in a RFC) rather then an API  to use it you need to use a library that will give you some objects that you can code against that will then generated the necessary communication that follows the protocol rules. Some example of these are CDOSys, and System.NET.Mail. From an Exchange technical point of view when you submit a message via SMTP your submitting it directly into the Transport Pipeline so i...

Complex properties are one of the more challenging elements when it comes to developing with Exchange and bitwise properties are one of the more challenging property types you may need to deal with. The most common bitwise property in Exchange you may access/use is the PR_MessageFlags property https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee160304(v=exchg.80).aspx  . If you look at this property on a Message that you received you might see something like What the  ExcludesBitmask SearchFilter/Restriction in EWS allows you to do is create a search where you can specifically exclude messages because they have one of these bitmask values set. Eg you might want to exclude Draft messages from your search or maybe you want to exclude any messages that where SentBy you in the Inbox. You can also use this Search Filter with the Not filter which Negates the restriction so if I created a Searchfilter to excluded all messages with the MSGFlag_HasAttached then negated that with ...

Messages that are stored in Exchange can be flagged in a number of ways to indicate different states to the user or as an effective method to prompt the user to action (or make them remember to do something). Unread/Read Flags  The most commonly used Flag in Exchange is the Unread/Read Message flag which is used so when a message arrives in Mailbox a user can track which messages they have read. In EWS this flag is surfaced in the API in the form of a Strongly type property isRead   https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/office/bb408987(v=exchg.150).aspx  . (The underlying Store property that back this is PidTagMessageFlags property https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee160304(v=exchg.80).aspx   which is a bitwise flag representing many states of a message). The other place the Unread Message flag is surfaced is on the Folder object in the guise of the Unread Item count. So in the below example we Bind to Inbox folder and we...