E

encoding services

MIDL-generated stub routines that provide support for data encoding and decoding (also known as "pickling" or "serialization"). These services allow you to control the buffers containing the data to be marshaled and unmarshaled. See also type serialization, procedure serialization.

endpoint

A network-specific address of a server process for remote procedure calls. The actual name of the endpoint depends on the protocol sequence being used. See also dynamic endpoint and well-known endpoint.

endpoint mapper

(or endpoint-mapping service) Part of the RPC subsystem (RPCSS) that allows the run-time library to dynamically assign and resolve endpoints. See also endpoint.

encapsulated union

A MIDL construct that allows unions to be passed as part of a remote procedure call by embedding the union in a structure in which the discriminant is the first field of the structure, and the union is the second (and final) field of the structure. The IDL keyword switch specifies that a union is encapsulated. See also non-encapsulated union.

entry point vector (EPV)

An array of pointers to functions that implement the operations specified in the interface. Each element in the array corresponds to a function defined in the IDL file. Entry-point vectors allow distributed applications to support more than one implementation of the functions defined in the IDL file.