Remote Automation allows you to connect to a local or a remote data source, use a client application to display and/or edit the associated data, and commit any local changes back to the original data source. Remote Automation was developed for Microsoft Visual Basic 4.0 Enterprise Edition by augmenting the OLE Automation parts of OLE and COM. It is compatible with, and can be replaced by, distributed COM, which currently ships with Microsoft Windows NT 4.0 and will ship with Windows 95.
Please be aware that Remote Automation is wholly subsumed by distributed COM (DCOM); if you have the opportunity to use DCOM instead of Remote Automation in your applications, do so. Nevertheless, there are scenarios where Remote Automation is currently more appropriate:
There need be no difference between programs created to use Remote Automation and those created to use distributed COM. The configuration utilities listed below make it very simple to switch operations between Remote Automation and distributed COM. Consequently, it is not difficult to upgrade an application from Remote Automation to distributed COM once the operating-system support is in place.
The configuration utilities listed in the following table and the supporting Visual Basic components in the bulleted list below are automatically installed with Visual C++ Enterprise Edition.
Remote Automation Configuration Tools
| Application name | File name |
| Remote Automation Manager | AUTMGR32.EXE |
| Remote Automation Proxy | AUTPRX32.DLL |
| Remote Automation Connection Manager | RACMGR32.EXE |
| Remote Automation Connection Registry Server | RACREG32.DLL |
Remote Automation requires the following Visual Basic components. These files are installed by Visual C++ Setup. The version number of these files is the same or greater than those that shipped with Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 Enterprise Edition:
For more information, see Remote Automation.