[Evolution-hackers] making good progress decoding MAPI

[Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton <lkcl lkcl net>]

i've moved on to decoding MAPI. 

Nspi and EMSMDB, when using muddle to get the basic structure, and
using FreeDCE to regenerate code, and looking at Wine's MAPIDEFS.h to
fill in the blanks that muddle cannot possibly get, was a piece of
piss. 

MAPI is a complete bitch. i've revived an old project called "aparser"
which is an IDL compiler written in awk by andrew tridgell. 

it's very very useful. 

basically it can generate code from templates, given an input file
specifying the data structures. 

i might, if it becomes particularly handy, convert it to python,
because awk is very obscure. 

so far i'm generating a "decoder", and have about three functions
(request and response) decoded and understood so far using aparser
and a further four that need conversion to aparser IDL format. 

once i am happy with the "decoder", i will write templates
that can spew forth client-side code and server-side stubs.
i'll then be ready to create an exchange 5.5 server (with some
hard-coded responses) and to continue with my test client.

wheeee :)


so.

by the time i am done, there will exist a client-side library
for evolution to call DIRECTLY into an Exchange 5.5 server.

no DLLs.  no pissing about installing client or server code.

just free software.

l.

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