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Q230294: Remote Data Service 1.5 Release Notes

Article: Q230294
Product(s): Internet Information Server
Version(s): 4.0
Operating System(s): 
Keyword(s): 
Last Modified: 18-MAR-2002

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The information in this article applies to:

- Microsoft Windows NT version 4.0 Option Pack 
- Microsoft Internet Information Server version 4.0 
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SUMMARY
=======

This article contains a copy of the Remote Data Service 1.5 Release Notes
included with the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. It is listed here so that the
issues it covers are included in queries performed against the Knowledge Base.

The file containing these Release Notes is located in
<%SystemRoot%>\Help\Iis\Htm\Core\Adcrlnts.htm.

NOTE: Knowledge Base articles may be distributed in either ASCII-text or HTML
form. If you are viewing the ASCII-text version of this article, some formatting
may have been lost when it was converted from the original HTML form of
Adcrlnts.htm

MORE INFORMATION
================

Remote Data Service 1.5 Release Notes
-------------------------------------

This document provides late-breaking or other information that supplements the
Microsoft Remote Data Service 1.5 documentation.

The following sections are included in this document:

- Product Description

- New Features

- Installation Notes

- Technical Support

- Technical Notes

- Known Issues

- Copyright Information

Product Description
-------------------

Microsoft Remote Data Service (RDS) is a fast and efficient data connectivity and
data publishing framework for applications hosted in Internet Explorer. It is
based on a client/server, distributed technology that works over HTTP, HTTPS
(HTTP over Secure Sockets layer), and DCOM application protocols. Using
data-aware ActiveX controls, RDS provides data access programming in the style
of Microsoft Visual Basic to Web developers who need to build distributed,
data-intensive applications for use over corporate intranets and the Internet.

CHANGE IN PRODUCT NAME

The name, Microsoft Advanced Data Connector (ADC) is changing to Microsoft Remote
Data Service (RDS), a feature of Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). ADC has
always relied on ADO and this change represents a move to more closely integrate
and clarify the relationship between these two components. ADO is a programming
interface which allows easy and flexible access to OLE DB and ODBC data sources.
Remote Data Service builds on ADO to provide an easy, disconnected recordset,
and remoting service. The functionality of Advanced Data Connector has not been
affected by this change, and you will see a number of great new features with
the release of version 1.5.

New Features
------------

The following are new features in Remote Data Service 1.5. For more information
on these features, refer to the documentation.

- Expanded updatability. You can now update data to all ODBC compliant data
  sources, and no longer need to use the "for browse" clause.

- ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) methods now also provide RDS remoting
  functionality from within ADO. This addition in programming model seamlessly
  integrates RDS into ADO.

- Sorting and filtering on Recordset objects.

- Added support for asynchronous execution and result set fetching. This allows
  the control to be handed back to the programmer or user without having to
  wait for a query to finish.

- Multiple output parameter support for business objects.

- The CreateRecordset method on the RDS.DataControl object, so custom Recordset
  objects can now be created on the client as well as on the
  RDSServer.DataFactory.

- The ConvertToString method on the RDSServer.DataFactory object.

- Safe array marshaling provides support for the Safe Array data type.

- Client impersonation provides support for IIS' NT Challenge/Response password
  authentication feature.

Installation Notes
------------------

Before You Run Setup

Before you install Microsoft Remote Data Service, make sure that your client and
server computers meet the minimum hardware and software requirements.

Hardware Requirements

To install Remote Data Service, you must meet certain hardware requirements,
which include the following:

- Any Microsoft Windows NT or Microsoft Windows 95 x86-compatible computer, or
  a Digital Equipment Corporation Alpha processor machine.

- A hard disk with a minimum of 8 megabytes (MB) available space for a full
  installation of all the updated components required for RDS to run.

- A minimum of 12 MB of RAM for client computers.

- A minimum of 24 MB of RAM for server computers (32 MB of RAM recommended).

Software Requirements

Before you install Remote Data Service on a server computer, your server computer
must meet the following software requirements:

- Any of the following operating system platforms: Windows NT 4.0 Server or
  Workstation with Service Pack 3 (SP3) or later. Remote Data Service currently
  supports the x86/Intel and Alpha platforms. For production data environments,
  the NT Server platform is strongly recommended.

- Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) 3.0 or 4.0, with Microsoft Active
  Server Pages.

- Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 with Service Pack 2, or other ODBC 2.0 or greater
  (Level 1 compliant) data source.

To access Remote Data Service applications from client computers, client
computers must meet the following software requirements:

- Any of the following operating system platforms: Windows 95, Windows NT
  Server 4.0 or later or Windows NT Workstation 4.0 or later.

- Microsoft Internet Explorer version 4.0 or later.

NOTE: Remote Data Service has not been tested with the Netscape browser
technology.

To build client Web pages, you can use typical HTML authoring tools, such as
Notepad or the more fully featured Microsoft ActiveX Control Pad.

To program server-side business objects, you can use any ActiveX/COM
DLL-compatible tool, such as Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 or later, or Microsoft
Visual C++.

Installing Microsoft Remote Data Service

For Remote Data Service to work correctly, you should ensure that the Remote Data
Service server and client components are installed correctly. The server
component is installed via the setup program (mdac_nts.exe for Windows NT
Server; mdac_ntw.exe for Windows NT Workstation; mdac_95.exe for Windows 95;
mdac_as for Alpha server; mdac_aw.exe for Alpha workstation) or with the IIS 4.0
integrated setup. The client files required are provided with Internet Explorer
4.0, so no .cab file or setup program is required.

Installing RDS Server Components on Your Web Servers

You will install the Microsoft Remote Data Service server components on your Web
server computer, which should have Windows NT Server version 4.0 with SP3 or
later. Setup assumes that your computer meets all of the software requirements.
To install Remote Data Service server components:

1. From your Web server computer, connect to the Remote Data Service World Wide
  Web site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/data/rds (http://www.microsoft.com/data/rds/)

2. Click Free Downloads in the left frame.

3. Click the link for the installation you want (mdac_nts.exe for Windows NT
  Server; mdac_ntw.exe for Windows NT Workstation; mdac_95.exe for Windows 95;
  mdac_as.exe for Alpha server; mdac_aw.exe for Alpha workstation) to install
  the software and documentation.

4. Close other programs which may be running.

5. Follow the Setup instructions on the screen.

The Setup program installs the program files to the <device>:\Program
Files\Common Files\System\MSADC directory. (This location is adjacent to other
complementary Microsoft technologies such as ActiveX Data Objects and OLE DB.)
The following subdirectories are created under the \MSADC directory with the
setup program.

+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
|                    |                                                                          | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| Subdirectory       | Description                                                              | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ..\MSADC\Doc       | Contains the documentation.                                              | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ..\MSADC\Samples   | Contains the sample files.                                               | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+
| ..\MSADC\Samples11 | Contains the sample files for the RDS 1.1 client, if this was installed. | 
+-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+

The server installation program (mdac_nts.exe) also creates a Microsoft Internet
Information Server virtual root on your Web server computer. The root is
designated http://<servername>/msadc and you can use it to reference the
files in that directory tree from the browser.

After you have followed this procedure to set up Microsoft Remote Data Service on
your Web server computer, you can validate your installation (see Validating
Setup, below).

INSTALLING RDS CLIENT COMPONENTS ON YOUR CLIENT COMPUTERS

Microsoft Internet Explorer 4.0 already includes the necessary Remote Data
Service (RDS) client components. Therefore, you don't need to include a .cab
file on your Web page because client computers will already have the RDS client
component DLLs. See the Technical Notes for a list of client files if your
application needs to provide the client files.

VALIDATING SETUP

You can use the ADCTest.asp sample application to validate your Microsoft Remote
Data Service installation. To validate setup with ADCTest, follow these steps:

1. Start Internet Explorer, and enter the following address

  http://<servername>/MSADC/Samples/Adctest.asp

where <servername> is the name of your Web server.

This should display the Remote Data Service Query Page. You'll notice that the
server, connection, and query information is already provided for you.

2. Click Run to execute the query.

  If the grid displays a resultset, your installation is correct.

If you run into any problems, review the setup instructions and refer to the
"Troubleshooting Remote Data Service" and "Other RDS Configuration Information"
topics in online Help.

Technical Support
-----------------

Contacting Microsoft Technical Support

If you have a technical question about Remote Data Service, please visit the
Microsoft Data Access Web Site at the following Web site for information about
support available from Microsoft Technical Support:

http://www.microsoft.com/data/ (http://www.microsoft.com/data/)

Visiting the Microsoft Remote Data Service Web Site

You can visit the Microsoft Remote Data Service Home Page on the World Wide Web
for documentation updates and information about other related technologies. The
Web address is:

http://www.microsoft.com/data/rds (http://www.microsoft.com/data/rds)

JOINING THE REMOTE DATA SERVICE PUBLIC NEWSGROUP

To facilitate discussion and information sharing, Microsoft has set up a public
newsgroup: microsoft.public.ado.rds. You are welcome to post articles and
messages to this unmoderated, unsupported newsgroup. Microsoft does not
guarantee responses or direct support. For more information, visit the Remote
Data Service Web site at:

http://www.microsoft.com/data/rds/ ( http://www.microsoft.com/data/rds/)

Technical Notes
---------------

- RDS (ADC) Beta 1 and Beta 2 clients and servers are not intended to be mixed
  with final release versions of RDS clients and servers. You should uninstall,
  and upgrade to the release version of the software to gain the benefit of
  product fixes and new features. The client files for RDS 1.5 are provided
  with Internet Explorer 4.0, so no .cab file or separate installation is
  required.

- Using FoxPro Databases

If you access Visual FoxPro data, you must use the latest Visual FoxPro ODBC
driver (version 5.0.0.402 or later), which is available from the following Web
site:

http://www.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/vfdownload
(http://www.microsoft.com/vfoxpro/vfdownload)

If you don't use the latest driver, you may not be able to execute queries
correctly.

- Sample Applications

To load the grid in the RDS sample applications, you need to be able to access
the Internet (as opposed to your intranet). If you try to load the samples that
use the Sheridan grid, the Sheridan cab file referenced in the CODEBASE line
attempts to download the mfc42.dll file patch from the Microsoft general fixes
Web site. If it is unable to access this patch, the grid will not load. If the
ActiveX control for the grid (ssdatb32.ocx) already resides on the client
computer, the CODEBASE line will not need to unpack the .cab file, and the patch
download prompt will not be encountered.

- When you install the sample applications, an attempt is made to create a user
  account ("adcdemo") within Microsoft(R) SQL Server. If this account already
  exists, the installation will succeed, however, when you run the sample
  application you may receive a "login failed" message. You can edit the sample
  files to set the username and password to the actual test account
  information.

- 

  "System error: Out of Virtual Memory" Error

If you receive the error "System error: out of virtual memory error" from the Web
Server requiring a reboot, the following may address the error. Your Web server
machine may be out of virtual memory, or the SQL data source server may require
more TempDB space to handle the size of the query you are attempting to run.
Virtual memory can be adjusted from Control Panel (click the System icon, select
the Performance tab, and click the Virtual Memory button to see if there is
extra hard disk space available). More information on how to adjust the TempDB
space can be found in the "Performance" Help topic's subtopic, "Ensuring
Sufficient TempDB Space."

- MDAC Client Files Provided with Internet Explorer 4.0

For Web client convenience, the Microsoft Data Access Components client files are
included with Internet Explorer version 4.0. Provided below is a list of files
and their install locations if you wish to make these files available to your
non-Internet Explorer client components using the MDAC server.

Files marked with an asterisk (*) should be self-registered with regsvr32.dll
which can be found in the \system (or \system32) directory of your machine. The
notation for \system below refers to \winnt\system32 directory on Windows NT
machines, or \win95\system on Windows 95 machines. It is important that these
files are consistently installed to these locations, to ensure that all programs
which rely on them will continue to function correctly in this and later
versions.

msadce.dll* - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\msadc

msadcer.dll - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\msadc

msadco.dll* - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\msadc

msadcor.dll - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\msadc

msader15.dll - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\ado

msador15.dll* - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\ado

msdadc.dll* - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\ole db

msdaps.dll* - installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\ole db

msdaer.dll* - (Optional, for ADO error messages) installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\ole db

msdaerr.dll* - (Optional, for ADO error messages) installed to \Program Files\Common Files\system\ole db

msr2c.dll* - installed to \system by Internet Explorer

msr2cenu.dll - installed to \system by Internet Explorer

wininet.dll* - installed to \system by Internet Explorer

msdatsrc.tlb - installed to \system

- If the install location name must be changed, the IIS vroot of /MSADC must
  remain. The file MSADCS.DLL requires it be located in the root directory of
  the /MSADC vroot.

- Cannot filter for NULL The Filter property is not currently able to search
  for Null values. The setting might be set as follows 'zipcode', '=',
  '<null>' (which gets converted to NULL by the VBScript code), followed
  by the Reset method to run the filter action. You will get a type mismatch
  error.

- The RDS.DataControl features three events that are not mentioned in the
  documentation. These events are associated with asynchronous recordset
  population. OnReadyStateChange - Fires whenever the ReadyState property
  changes. This event is not available in JScript.

  OnDataSetComplete - Fires when all data is fetched.

  OnDataSetChanged - Fires when a new Recordset is returned but not yet fully
  populated.

  During an async fetch, the following sequence of events occurs:
  OnReadyStateChange - The ReadyState property is set to
  adcReadyStateInteractive while data is being fetched.

  OnDataSetComplete - All data is fetched, but ReadyState is still set to
  adcReadyStateInteractive.

  OnReadyStateChange - The ReadyState property changes to adcReadyStateComplete.

- The connection string for Remote Data Service typically references System
  DSNs with a syntax like "DSN=MyDSN;UID=SalesMgr;PWD=Secret;". The syntax for
  using a File DSN would be "FileDSN=c:\MySQL.dsn;".

To get a disconnected recordset via ADO, you can use the following syntax.

Rather than: cnn.Connectionstring =
"provider=msdasql;dsn=MySQL;uid=SalesMgr;pwd=Secret" you can use:
cnn.Connectionstring = "provider=MS Remote;Remote Server=http://MyServer;Remote
Provider=msdasql;dsn=MySQL;uid=sa;pwd="

Known Issues
------------

The following is a list of Remote Data Service 1.5 known issues.

- The OnReadyStateChange async event is not issued. To work around this, you
  can test the following events and property for equivalent state:

OnDataSetChanged event will be issued when the Recordset exists, the query
execution is complete, but not all rows are present. Immediately after the
OnDataSetChanged event is issued, the ReadyState property is a value of 3.

OnDataSetComplete event will be issued when the Recordset exists, and all rows
are present. Immediately after the OnDataSetComplete event is issued the
ReadyState property a value of 4.

- If you receive an error in Setup about the MTXOCI.DLL, your machine may have
  an older version of Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS). To resolve this
  issue, upgrade to the newest version of MTS, which provides this necessary
  file.

- Version 1.0.0.806 of the Visual Basic Script DLL (vbscript.dll) contains a
  memory leak. An updated version of the DLL (2.0.0.1114 or later) resolves the
  issue. It is available with Internet Information Server 3.0, and can be
  downloaded from:

http://www.microsoft.com/vbscript (http://www.microsoft.com/vbscript)

- The file msdaps.dll will register and work correctly. Currently it is unable
  to unregister, however. This will only affect uninstall, and not the
  functionality of the product. This may be resolved in NT Service Pack 4.

- When using Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 with SQL Server Service Pack 3 installed,
  an UPDATE, INSERT, or DELETE will fail if attempted against a self-join. An
  error will occur on the line of code containing the SubmitChanges method.

- The adctest.asp sample will silently fail unless the machine it is running on
  has access to the internet (as opposed to an intranet). The application needs
  to load some dll's from microsoft.com.

- The language reference topics for the Reset method and the
  SortColumn,SortDirection, FilterValue, FilterCriterion, and FilterColumn
  properties all state that execution of the Reset method replaces the existing
  RDS.DataControl object's Recordset with a read-only Recordset. This is
  incorrect; the new Recordset is updatable.

- When using an ORDER BY clause in a query against Microsoft SQL server with
  Microsoft SQL Server Service Pack 3 installed, and returning an updatable
  client-side cursor, columns referenced in the ORDER BY clause must also be
  referenced in the SELECT clause.

- The ODBC driver for Informix databases does not support transactions (being
  able to roll back a change to the data). RDS does not support updating to
  drivers without transactions support. Attempting to call SubmitChanges will
  give the following error:

  The operation requested by the application is not supported by the provider.

Copyright Information
---------------------

(C) 1997 Microsoft Corporation These materials are provided "as-is," for
informational purposes only.

Neither Microsoft nor its suppliers makes any warranty, express or implied with
respect to the content of these materials or the accuracy of any information
contained herein, including, without limitation, the implied warranties of
merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. Because some
states/jurisdictions do not allow exclusions of implied warranties, the above
limitation may not apply to you.

Neither Microsoft nor its suppliers shall have any liability for any damages
whatsoever including consequential, incidental, direct, indirect, special, and
lost profits. Because some states/jurisdictions do not allow exclusions of
implied warranties, the above limitation may not apply to you. In any event,
Microsoft's and its suppliers' entire liability in any manner arising out of
these materials, whether by tort, contract, or otherwise shall not exceed the
suggested retail price of these materials. Corporation. All rights reserved.

Additional query words: rds iis kbreadme readme adcrlnts.htm adcrlnts ntop akz

======================================================================
Keywords          :  
Technology        : kbWinNTsearch kbWinNT400search kbiisSearch kbiis400 kbWinNT400OptionPack
Version           : :4.0
Issue type        : kbhowto

=============================================================================

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