Introduction

Exchange Web Services (EWS) was introduced with Exchange 2007. It gave developers the ability to write applications that previously required the use of multiple APIs, such as CDOEx, Exchange OLEDB, WebDAV and more. Today, developers can call the Exchange Management Shell cmdlets from .NET-managed applications to perform administrative tasks programmatically. When it comes to manipulating the contents of a mailbox, such as creating or modifying calendar items, e-mail messages, contacts, or tasks, developers now use EWS.

Working with EWS requires formatting and sending an XML request over HTTP and parsing the XML response from an Exchange server. Initially, developers used either raw XML or auto-generated proxy classes in Visual Studio to do this, and it required some very verbose code that was difficult to read and debug. Fortunately, the EWS team developed and released the EWS Managed API in April 2009. The EWS Managed API is a fully object-oriented .NET wrapper for the EWS...