Small Business Server and language development
Small Business Server and language development
Tip I read with interest your February Product Watch article this month, in particular the announcement by Microsoft about Small Business Server (February 1998, p41). I bought the NFR copy as a Sales Partner, as it sounded as though it was just what my organisation was looking for. (We run a small number of PCs here, developing VB applications.) The SBS installation got off to a rocky start with errors. Unfortunately I can't find my notes on the exact messaging. However it resulted in a call to Microsoft where I found that (no surprise really) they had omitted a file from the International edition. The fix was to generate a new set of three boot disks from the CD. This cured the install problems. The real sting took longer to emerge. After loading VB5 and all the support controls and Apps that I had been working on prior to the upgrade, every time I tried to load an app, errors were reported. On starting a new app, and loading controls one by one onto the default form, I found that the culprit was the Microsoft file comctrl32.ocx (Common Controls). Each time I tried to place a control which used this file on the form, VB reported the following: "License information for this component not found. You do not have an appropriate license to use this functionality in the design environment" I have VB5 running on Win 95 (OSR1 and 2) and NT 4 Workstation on other machines with no problems. I sent an e-mail off to the Small Business Tech centre in the US, and a week later had no reply. A phone call to Microsoft in Sydney finally extracted the information that "NT 4 Small Business Server does not support any language development"! No indication of this fact has to my knowledge been advertised, and I guess that some 30-- 40 per cent of users might be involved in some sort of language development. Your readers might like to know of this fact before they consider purchasing the product for upwards of $2000. - Rob Fairweather | Category: General Issue: Apr 1998 |
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