• This release of the Microsoft VM strictly enforces the following requirement: for a class to access methods of a class in another package, the second class must be declared public. Previous releases did not enforce this requirement. Hence some applets that worked before may display errors with the new virtual machine. It is advisable to make the packages conform to this Java requirement.

• For ActiveX-Beans integration, certain functionality (such as persistence and OC96 windowless support) is not yet present. The ActiveX control hosting does not support all ambient properties. Code download will be provided in future releases.

• VM uninstall option is provided in this release. Be aware of the following issues:

  If you want use the VM uninstall option, go to Control Panel, Add/Remove Software and uninstall the VM. If you uninstall the VM yet still plan to use Internet Explorer 4.0, this may cause potential problems with the downloading ability of the browser.

  Internet Explorer 4.0 uninstall includes an option to remove the Microsoft VM for Java. If you uninstall Internet Explorer 4.0 yet plan to use the VM and the SDK, the VM may not function properly. You must reinstall the stand-alone VM, by using the "Download" or the "Install and Download" option offered by SDKsetup.exe (the SDK download wizard). You can obtain the stand alone VM (msjavx86.exe) from the download directory you define or use the default directory C:\SDK-Java.20\Components. You can then double click on the msjavx86.exe to reinstall the VM at any time.

• Using package-managed classes with existing tools:

  A tool called clspack creates all the ZIP files that are usually included in %WINDIR%\Java\Classes, and are now stored in the package manager. It is provided in the SDK\bin directory. You can use it by setting the path to the SDK\bin (set path=c:\sdk-java.20\bin;%path%) or copying it into %windir% directory.

  In addition, the value of the CLASSPATH registry setting is prepended with a reference to this generated classes.zip file (if one is not currently there). The compiler provided with the SDK (jvc.exe) checks this location by default for classes, so there is no need to set the CLASSPATH environment variable.

  For other compilers that do not check this location by default, set the CLASSPATH environment variable with:

  set CLASSPATH=%WINDIR%\Java\Classes\Classes.zip

  before running the compiler. It's a good idea to place this command in a batch file for easy use.

• Raw Native Interface Enhancements:

  The Raw Native Interface (RNI) has been extended as a result of feedback and performance enhancements. The enhancements made to RNI are in four primary areas:

• Additional APIs to enable reflection from native code
• Changes to support future garbage collection performance enhancements
• RNIGetCompatibleVersion requirement for RNI DLLs
• RNI invocation APIs

For a more detailed description of the new and updated APIs, see the SDK documentation.

• Any class calling the ActiveXControl class needs to be trusted. If an applet intends to host an ActiveX Control using the ActiveXControl class, it needs to be signed with the "fully trusted" permission. Any class calling the ActiveXControl class needs to be on the CLASSPATH or have the right permissions ascribed to it through package management. If the jactivex tool is used to host an ActiveX Control, the classes output by the tool end up using the ActiveXControl class. So any code using the classes output by jactivex needs to be trusted.

• Some of the XML Data Source Object (DSO) functionality requires Internet Explorer version 4.0 or higher.

• The following components of the XML specification have not yet been implemented:
  • Conditional sections in the DTD (INCLUDE & IGNORE keywords).
  • Some aspects of character encoding.
  For more information and an updated version of the Microsoft® XML parser please refer to the XML website.