Building Visual Basic 4.0 Classes to Communicate with Lotus Notes

Lotus Notes provides a secure environment for mail, discussions and a wide range of group development tasks. As such, the standard Notes client will perform a large variety of powerful operations without any user programming. However, there are any number of special purpose applications where using the Notes infrastructure will provide a well controlled environment but where the Notes client can't provide the combination of functions you need. For such cases, Lotus provides a C and Visual Basic interface called HiTest which allows you to access most of the Notes data structures and develop you own client interface. The HiTest functions are written as a 16-bit Windows DLL and are completely procedural. In this article we construct Visual Basic classes for the major Notes functions and use them to make a simple telephone dialer program. We will also discuss how to make a 16-bit OLE server to allow these functions to be called from the 32-bit version of VB4 running under Windows 95.