General Information About the OLE Automation Manager & RacMan

• Microsoft Visual FoxPro for Windows, version 5.0

SUMMARY

This article provides general information about the OLE Automation Manager and its use within Microsoft Visual FoxPro 5.0.

MORE INFORMATION

The Automation Manager and Remote Automation Connection Manager components were developed for Visual Basic 4.0. Visual FoxPro adopted these components in an effort to avoid duplicate efforts as new technologies affecting remote automation become available. There is nothing specific that these components support in Visual Basic 4.0 that they do not support in Visual FoxPro 5.0.

The Automation Manager component was developed for Visual Basic, but it is actually written in C and handles all the remote procedure calls (RPCs) and marshalling for remote automation. The Automation Manager program (Autmgr32.exe) must be installed and running on the server machine in order for the client to see the remote server. If an OLE callback is made from an object reference passed by the client to the remote server, you must also install the Automation Manager on the client machine.

NOTE: If the Automation Manager is not running, it is automatically launched.

The Remote Automation Connection Manager (RacMan) is written in Visual Basic 4.0 (Racmgr32.exe), which requires the distribution of the Visual Basic run-time libraries. In addition, it uses some ActiveX controls. RacMan's sole purpose is to handle registry settings that control remote connectivity on the client side and client access on the server side. In terms of registering servers remotely, RacMan requires that the server be registered locally. The Setup Wizard uses a tool called Clireg32.dll that allows you to register a server remotely without first actually having to install it or register it locally.