Read-only access to maildb w/o devoper license

On notes 6/XP I was able to add a reference to Notes Objects from VB6 and MS Office VBA. I could send email and do a few other operations.

We have updated to Notes 8.0/Vista and I can no longer do simple tasks from external programs. Is that by design?

Is it posible to use VB.Net or MS Office VBA to iterate of Calendar items for example? If so could someone point me to a VBA example?

TIA