Recommended Exchange Server API for WP7 app

I am investigating developing an app for Windows Phone 7 that requires access to email/calendar information from Exchange Server (read only).

The way I see it there are 2 options EWS or ActiveSync.

WP7 only supports Basic Authentication.

By default on Exchange server installations the EWS virtual direc开发者_如何学编程tory has Basic Authentication disabled meaning a configuration change of Exchange Server to allow EWS to be used.

The ActiveSync protocol looks like it would take some time to get your head around and develop an implementation.

The questions are 1. How common is it for people to enable basic authentication for EWS? Is this something that most businesses are likely to not want to do?

2. How difficult is it to learn and use the ActiveSync protocol? Is it something that could be done in days, weeks or months?

1) To find out about the common configuration of EWS servers I'd spek to some sysadmins and ask them. Maybe try on https://serverfault.com/

1) How difficult something is to learn very much depends on the skills and experience of the person learning and the teaching resources available. This is a non-trivial protocol so I wouldn't expect learning it to take days. There will also be a licensing cost of implementing Excahange ActiveSync which I suspect would make it an expensive option.

Option 3: Create your own web service that acts as a proxy to EWS and does the authentication for you. Ugly and a bit painful, but if your app is architected well, once WP7 supports better authentication, switching to directly hit EWS should be pretty simple.

ActiveSync is painful and does not support everything that EWS supports. I would recommend going the EWS route if you have that option.

If your going to use ActiveSync, think again... it uses wbxml and you would need to create your own API for doing calls - this means crating tokenized blobs which must be 100% perfect and account for all aspects of whatever type of messaging items you are going against or will risk creating bad items or even poison ones. The devistation caused by bad EAS calls could well exceed your customer base... so, you need to be very careful. Also, while the specs are public, it needs an very expensive license. If you license, you would need to get a support contract with a specific schedule in order to get develper support. With a team of developers, it will likely take 3-5 or so years to do a full implementation client side and work out most of the bugs. So, as far as the skills in email development, you and your other developers would need to be pretty hard-core. There may be third party APIs which wrap EAS calls... however, you should be sure that they are licensed and that that the license would cover your development - so, you would need to research those on your own.

EWS has more features and is far, far easier to use and is what is suggested... further, there is no special licensing, etc.

Using a proxy web service+Exchange Managed APIs so that WP7 can go against Exchange without writting a ton of code: http://www.telerik.com/products/windows-phone/getting-started/exchange-client.aspx ... can also use this approach to use NTLM.

Before considering EAS... http://blogs.msdn.com/b/webdav_101/archive/2011/09/29/new-to-exchange-activesync-development.aspx