LINQ to Microsoft Exchange Data

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Exchange ADO.NET Provider

The easiest way to integrate powerful Microsoft Exchange send and receive capabilities with .NET applications. Send & Receive Email, manage Exchange messages, folders, calendars, and more!

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LINQ provides general-purpose query facilities in .NET Framework 3.0 and above and provides one easy way to programmatically access data through from CData ADO.NET Data Providers. This example uses LINQ to access information from the Microsoft Exchange Data Provider.

This article demonstrates how to use LINQ to access Microsoft Exchange tables through the CData ADO.NET Data Provider for Microsoft Exchange. To do this you will LINQ to Entity Framework, which is used to generate the connection and can be used with any CData ADO.NET Data Providers to access data via LINQ.

See the help documentation for a guide to setting up an EF 6 project to use the provider.

  1. In a new project in Visual Studio, right-click on the project and choose to add a new item. Add an ADO.NET Entity Data Model.
  2. Choose EF Designer from Database and click Next.
  3. Add a new Data Connection, and change your data source type to "CData Microsoft Exchange Data Source".

  4. Enter your data source connection information.

    Specify the User and Password to connect to Exchange. Additionally, specify the address of the Exchange server you are connecting to and the Platform associated with the server.

    Below is a typical connection string:

    User='myUser@mydomain.onmicrosoft.com';Password='myPassword';Server='https://outlook.office365.com/EWS/Exchange.asmx';Platform='Exchange_Online';
  5. If saving your entity connection to App.Config, set an entity name. In this example we are setting ExchangeEntities as our entity connection in App.Config.
  6. Enter a model name and select any tables or views you would like to include in the model.

Using the entity you created, you can now perform select , update, delete, and insert commands. For example:

ExchangeEntities context = new ExchangeEntities(); var contactsQuery = from contacts in context.Contacts select contacts; foreach (var result in contactsQuery) { Console.WriteLine("{0} {1} ", result.Id, result.GivenName); }

See "LINQ and Entity Framework" chapter in the help documentation for example queries of the supported LINQ.