codingChris

Creating Exchange 2010 Mailboxes in C#

Wow, it’s been a while! I had full intentions of creating regular posts but that kind of slipped away. So I’ll make this one fairly short and just highlight the basics of creating an Exchange 2010 mailbox via remote code. Nothing fancy, but I will highlight one gotcha that I encountered when updating our user creation code after we migrated from Exchange 2003. Keep in mind that Exchange 2010 is built on Powershell and as such, all of connections and manipulation must be done through it.

First, we want to add our usings…

using System.Management.Automation;
using System.Management.Automation.Remoting;
using System.Management.Automation.Runspaces;

Next, we’re going to create the PSCredential, the WSManConnectionInfo, and the Runspace. We’ll then create a powershell command, invoke the powershell with the command and cross our fingers. 😀

PSCredential newCred = (PSCredential)null;
WSManConnectionInfo connectionInfo = new WSManConnectionInfo(new Uri("http://exchangeserver01.my.domain/powershell?serializationLevel=Full"), 
    "http://schemas.microsoft.com/powershell/Microsoft.Exchange", newCred);
connectionInfo.AuthenticationMechanism = AuthenticationMechanism.Kerberos;
Runspace runspace = RunspaceFactory.CreateRunspace(connectionInfo);
PowerShell powershell = PowerShell.Create();
                        
PSCommand command = new PSCommand();
command.AddCommand("Enable-Mailbox");
command.AddParameter("Identity", user.Guid.ToString());
command.AddParameter("Alias", user.UserName);
command.AddParameter("DomainController", ConnectingServer);
powershell.Commands = command;

try
{
    runspace.Open();
    powershell.Runspace = runspace;
    Collection results = powershell.Invoke();
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
    string er = ex.InnerException.ToString();
}
finally
{
    runspace.Dispose();
    runspace = null;

    powershell.Dispose();
    powershell = null;
                    
}

Now, a couple of things to note…

1) My gotcha…You don’t find a lot of information about creating a PSCredential using the credentials of the currently logged in user. Even the MSDN documentation only shows one constructor where you pass in a username and password. After searching around, some trial and error, I finally found this post detailing creating the PSCredential using Windows Authentication with no username or password supplied. Supplying credentials isn’t a problem, but as we log the account creations, and we didn’t have this issue when creating boxes in 2003, I wanted as seamless transition as possible. So this code just replaced the old code and my other Admins had no idea anything was different.

2) Accounts for my users need to be created at one of many different sites, and many times it’s not a site I’m currently at. So, the account is created on the ‘local to them’ server so they can immediately login and not need to wait for replication. Because of this, Exchange needs to know what server holds the account. If you don’t need this functionality, you can remove the DomainController command parameter above.

3) It is important to properly dispose of the runspace and powershell objects. Make sure this is done.