BUG: LinkTimeOut of -1 Waits Only 6553.5 Secs Before Time Out

- Standard and Professional Editions of Microsoft Visual Basic for

  Windows, version 2.0

SYMPTOMS

Contrary to the documentation and online Help for Microsoft Visual Basic, setting the LinkTimeOut property of a control to -1 will not cause the control to wait forever for a DDE operation to complete. Setting the LinkTimeOut property to -1 will cause the control to wait for 65535 intervals of 1/10 second, for a total of approximately 1 hour and 49 minutes.

WORKAROUND

To work around this problem, you can trap the DDE time-out error using the On Error statement in Visual Basic. If the error was "Timeout while waiting for DDE response," you can retry the DDE operation until it succeeds. The following is a code example:

   Sub DDE_Retry_Forever (Source as Control, commandx$)
      On Local Error Goto Handler

      Source.LinkExecute commandx$
      Exit Sub

      Handler:
      If Err = 286 Then
         Resume
      Else
         Error Err
      End If
   End Sub

STATUS

Microsoft has confirmed this to be a bug in the Microsoft products listed at the beginning of this article. We are researching this problem and will post new information here in the Microsoft Knowledge Base as it becomes available.