Mar 30

Using Terminal Services and RemoteApp to Extend Your Microsoft Access and other Windows Applications Over the Internet

Terminal Services RemoteApp and Microsoft AccessRead our new paper on using Terminal Services and RemoteApp to Extend Microsoft Access and Other Windows Applications Over the Internet.

One of the features of Microsoft Windows Server that is increasingly popular over the last few years is the Terminal Server and more recently RemoteApp. With few exceptions, most Windows applications work within a Terminal Server environment. By doing so, your investment in existing applications, and the power of Windows desktop features and interoperability, can be exposed over the Internet.

This is particularly powerful for database applications such as Microsoft Access since it eliminates the need to send large amounts of data over the Internet for Access to process and users do not need to install Access on their machine. With RemoteApp, you can set up a terminal server experience where your users can only run your application without running other applications or browsing your network. Easily web enable all your desktop applications.

Mar 22

Microsoft Windows 7 Service Pack 1 Breaks Backward Compatibility with ActiveX Data Objects (ADO)

The recent release of Windows 7, Service Pack 1 (and Windows 2008 R2) breaks backward compatibility for Microsoft ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). That means if your .NET, Visual Basic 6, VBA/Office, C++ or other program includes an ADO library reference, and you compile your application or COM object on a Windows 7 SP1 machine, it will not run when deployed to an earlier environment containing the existing ADO object.

An error you may encounter is: Unable to cast COM object of type ‘System.__ComObject’ to interface type ‘ADODB.Connection’.

Basically, the interface IDs for files like MSADO28.tlb and MSADO15.dll have changed. For more information on this, read the Microsoft KnowledgeBase article 2517589.

This is not an issue in Visual Studio .NET if you are using ADO.NET. But if you are using ADO, it is an issue. For .NET specific issues, see KnowledgeBase article 840667, You receive unexpected errors when using ADO and ADO Multidimensional in a .NET Framework application.

Note that applications built on the original version will run fine on Windows 7, SP1. You just can’t go backwards. Watch out!