Hi Lauren,
I wouldn't know either how to do it using CAML (as used in the article). My first instinct would be to write code that uses the SharePoint Object Model to retrieve all events that might fall in the period specified on the form, and then display a message to the user saying that the specified event overlaps with other events. As you may already know, a calendar is a list in SharePoint, so you can use list SharePoint OM methods on it just like any other SharePoint list. You could also use a SharePoint event handler or workflow (methods 4 and 5 in
this post) to do the same thing, but with all of these methods, you'll still have to write code that uses the SharePoint OM to do the check for overlapping events.