C

CAB: See cabinet file.
cabinet file: A self-contained file used for application installation and setup. In a cabinet file (.cab), multiple files are compressed into one file. They are commonly found on Microsoft software distribution disks.
cascading style sheet (CSS): A set of additional tags that describe the appearance of individual HTML tags. The style sheet tags describe the font, color, paragraph alignment, and other attributes for common HTML tags such as headings, paragraphs, and lists. These tags can exist within your document or as a separate text file.
CDO: See Collaboration Data Objects.
CDONTS: See Collaboration Data Objects for NTS Component.
chapter: A recordset that acts as the child in a parent-child relationship implemented in hierarchical recordsets.
character set: A character set is a mapping of characters to their identifying numeric values. Most of the character sets commonly used in computers are single-byte character sets in which each character is identified by a value one byte wide. The large number of characters in Asian languages led to the development of multibyte character sets, in particular the double-byte character set (DBCS). Microsoft® Windows NT® /Windows® 2000 incorporates a new global standard for character encoding: Unicode.
CIM: See Common Information Model.
class: In object-oriented programming, a generalized category that describes a group of specific items, called objects, that can exist within it. Microsoft® Visual Basic® uses class to describe the group of declarations (properties, methods, constants, and so on) that make up an object.
clustered index: An index in which the logical or indexed order of the key values is the same as the physical stored order of the corresponding rows that exist in a table.
code page: An internal table that Windows NT® uses to relate the keys on the keyboard to the character codes used by the font. Code page 1252 is suitable for most European languages. Examples of alternate code pages are 1250 for Eastern European languages, 1256 for Arabic, and 1253 for Greek. Also see character set_bdg_gloss_character_set‹[definition taken verbatim from Refugee field kit (Gordon Brown, Jim Glass). Legal issue?]›.
Collaboration Data Objects (CDO): A technology for building messaging or collaboration applications. In versions previous to 1.1, CDO was called OLE Messaging; in version 1.1 it was called Active Messaging. It is designed to simplify the creation of applications with messaging functionality, or to add messaging functionality to existing applications. For more information, see "Messaging and Collaboration Services" in the Microsoft Platform SDK.
Collaboration Data Objects for NTS Component (CDONTS): A CDO component (Collaboration Data Objects for Windows NT Server) that is intended to run on a Windows NT Server computer — for example, from an Active Server Pages script on a Microsoft Internet Information Server computer. It is not intended to run on a client process. No user dialog is invoked or supported by CDO for NTS. For more information, see "CDO 1.2.1" under "Messaging and Collaboration Services" in the Platform SDK.
COM: See Component Object Model.
COM+: See Component Services.
COM component: A binary file — such as a .dll, .ocx, or .exe file — that supports the COM standard for providing objects. COM components provide their services to other components and applications according to the COM specification. When an ActiveX® project is compiled, Visual Basic classes that are marked as public become COM components.
commit: In transaction-enabled environments, the act of making changes to data permanent or durable. See also two-phase commit protocol and ACID properties.
Common Information Model (CIM): The schema that underlies the management initiative for complex systems of networked computers that is implemented in Web-Based Enterprise Management (WBEM). The Common Information Model is implemented in XML.
component: See COM component.
Component Object Model (COM): An architecture for defining interfaces and interaction among objects implemented by widely varying software applications. A COM object instantiates one or more interfaces, each of which exposes zero or more properties and zero or more methods. All COM interfaces are derived from the base class IUnknown. Technologies built on the COM foundation include ActiveX, MAPI, and OLE.
Component Services (COM+): A set of services based on extensions of Microsoft Transaction Server and the Component Object Model (COM) that provide improved threading and security, transaction management, object pooling, queued components, and application administration and packaging.
connection pooling: The creation of a number of ODBC connections for use by software components that need to connect to a database. Connection pooling is natively supported by the ODBC driver. The number of connections and time-out values can be set in the system registry.
constraint: A property that can be placed on a column or set of columns in a table. SQL Server provides these constraints: CHECK, DEFAULT, FOREIGN KEY, REFERENCE, PRIMARY KEY, and UNIQUE.
CONTAINS: A Transact-SQL predicate used to search columns containing character-based data types for precise or "fuzzy" (less precise) matches to single words and phrases, the proximity of words within a certain distance of one another, or weighted matches.
context object: An extensible Microsoft Transaction Server (MTS) object that provides context for the execution of an instance including transaction, activity, and security properties. When an MTS object is created, MTS automatically creates a context object for it. When the MTS object is released, MTS automatically releases the context object.
CSS: See cascading style sheet.
cursor: A database object used by applications to manipulate data by rows instead of by sets. Using cursors, multiple operations can be performed row-by-row against a result set with or without returning to the original table. In other words, cursors conceptually return a result set based on tables within the database(s).
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