Visual Internet Toolkit 32 Ver. 4.00 & 4.01 Knowledgebase: Release Notes

Release Notes for version 4.00

New in this release:

IMAP

An IMAP DLL and IMAP ActiveX control are now included. IMAP is the standard for email users who are on the go. It allows you to keep your email centralized on a single server and access it from any other computer without actually having to download all the emails. IMAP is an extremely versatile protocol and allows you to write applications that allow users to see only the email messages they wish to based on their criteria specified, to download messages only of a given size, to decide whether or not to download attachments and much more.

LPR

A new control that allows your application to print a file directly to an LPD print server on the network has been added. This ActiveX also allows you to retrieve print queue information and delete jobs from the print queue.

Multithreading and Apartment Threading

The following controls are now apartment threaded: Firewall, FTP Client, MIME, NNTP, POP, RCP, Rexec, Rlogin, Rshell, SMTP, TCP Server, Telnet, TFTP, IMAP, LPR and Windows Sockets and their underlying DLLs that are included in the DLL section of this kit are Multithreaded.

Firewall support update

Firewall support was updated in Telnet, FTP client, SMTP, POP, NNTP, RLIB and TFTP.

POP

Both the DLL and ActiveX control now allow the user to send commands directly to the server. DirectCmd property and OnDirect event were added to the activeX and the pop_direct funtion was added to the DLL. The firewall support in this control has also been enhanced and the following properties added: FwAuthMethods, FwAddrType, FwSocksVer, FwUsername, FwPassword.

NNTP

Both the DLL and ActiveX control now allow the user to send commands directly to the server. DirectCmd property and OnDirect event were added to the activeX and the nntp_direct funtion was added to the DLL. The firewall support in this control has also been enhanced and the following properties added: FwAuthMethods, FwAddrType, FwSocksVer, FwUsername, FwPassword.

SMTP

Both the DLL and ActiveX control now allow the user to send commands directly to the server. DirectCmd property and OnDirect event were added to the activeX and the smtp_direct funtion was added to the DLL. The firewall support in this control has also been enhanced and the following properties added: FwAuthMethods, FwAddrType, FwSocksVer, FwUsername, FwPassword.

The Abort method now works correctly when called in the OnData event.

FTP Server

1. Support for the PASV mode command has been added. This command is needed to connect using the FTP in Microsoft Internet Explorer which only permits an FTP connection in PASV mode.
2. A data connection can now be opened using the default data port (20). To enable this feature the following registry entry must be set:
   SOFTWARE\Distinct\OCX\D_FTPS\UseDefaultDataPort is set to a non zero value.
3. Problems when using the wildcard * with the AddDir method have been fixed.

Firewall

1. Asynchronous connections are now supported. AsyncConnect and Abort methods have been implemented to support this.
2. Support for SOCKS5 Authentication has been added. AuthMethods, AddrType, SocksVer, Username properties have been added to support this.
3. In the DLL fw_async_connect, fw_get_info and fw_abort functions were added to support asyncronous connections to the firewall server.

MIME

Major enhancements have been made to the MIME library to cover the latest RFC specifications. Enhancements include:

1. Support for BinHex encoding. The following new properties were added: BinHexType, BinHexCreator, BinHexFlag, BinHexResource together with the BinHexEncode and BinHexDecode methods.
2. Support for handling interlinked objects has been added. Added new message properties relevant for external messages: ContentBase, ContentLocation, MultipartStart and MultipartType
3. The ability to send a description of the file contents and to encode the MIME header fields has been added. The file description can be added using the new message property FileDesc. To allow encoding of this property and the Filename property, the EncodeHdrField & DecodeHdrField methods, OnEncodeField & OnDecodeField events and the EncodedField property have been added.
4. A new method (CreateMessage or create_ex_message in the DLL) to create messages that allows the encoding of the header fields has been added. Note that the Create method used in previous releases has been kept for backward compatibility but should not be used in new applications. Corresponding events OnSetHeader, OnSetBody, OnSetAddrField, OnSetBodyB and SetBodyB method were also added for this purpose.
5. A new way to extract files has been added. It decodes and encodes header fields, parses the header and sets the properties for header type, subtype, filename, encoding type, character set, content id, content location, (relative URL), content base (absolute URL), type (type of multipart message such as html or rtf), file description and if encoding is binhex a number of other properties. For this purpose we have added new message extraction methods ExtractMessageStart, ExtractMessageData and ExtractMessageEnd (mime_extract_start, mime_extract_data, mime_extract_end in the DLL). Corresponding events OnRecvHeader, OnRecvBody, OnRecvBodyB, OnRecvAddrField were added and the RecvBodyB method.
6. Support for MIME messages containing rfc822 formatted messages within the message has been added.
7. Support for Context Disposition has been added. This allows you to specify the name of the attachment in the header.

TFTP

The following enhancements are made to this component:

1. It is now possible to set the size of each data packet before a Get or Put operation allowing you to increase throughput. To do this there is a new property BlkSize property in the ActiveX and a new function opt_set_blksize in the DLL. If the server does not support the requested size it will usually negotiate this down to a smaller size.
2. It is now possible to check for the file size before starting a Get or Put operation. For this a new property, NegotiateFileSize has been added to the ActiveX and two functions tftp_check_filesize and tftp_nocheck_filesize have been added to the DLL. Note that for this to work the server must be able to support this feature.

Distinct Network Monitor

The Distinct Network Monitor has been greatly enhanced for better performance - we have also fixed all the problems that you have reported in release 1.0 of the product. Other enhancements include a more intuitive interface and a complete parser sample (TFTP) to illustrate how you can write your own parser. Users who do not have administrator privileges can now use DNM on Windows NT.

Distinct Floating License Manager

A new registry entry has been added to the Distinct Floating License Manager. This allows the administrator to suppress the Confirm Exit dialog box when an attempt to shut down the computer is made. To enable this feature add:
Confirm in Software\Distinct\Servers\LicenseServer\Close and set it to "No"

Additional Sample Code

FTP Client

In addition to the large existing sample (which has been better commented), there are now new small samples in Visual Basic 5 for:

• Get a file using File Mode transfer
• Put a file using File Mode transfer
• Get a file using EventMode transfer
• Put a file using Event Mode transfer
• Sample that demonstrate the Parse method

Ras

A simple one-button sample that would dial to a fixed location given a phone book entry is included.

VT220

Samples in Visual Basic and VC++ have been added to illustrate the use of the Distinct Windows Sockets control used in conjunction with the VT220 control to manipulate data from a VT200 application.

Other

Several other samples have been updated to illustrate new features.

*Get Adobe Acrobat Reader if needed.

"Together with Distinct, we were able to offer our users an ideal soution to enabling them to connect to Yahoo! Pager, and to do so both quickly and reliably." [more]
Brian Park,
Producer of Yahoo! Pager, Yahoo! Inc.