Microsoft RPC (

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

Remote Procedure Call In distributed computing, a remote procedure call (RPC) is when a computer program causes a procedure ( subroutine) to execute in a different address space (commonly on another computer on a shared network), which is coded as if it were a normal ( ...

) is a modified version of DCE/RPC. Additions include partial support for

UCS-2 The Universal Coded Character Set (UCS, Unicode) is a standard set of characters defined by the international standard ISO/IEC 10646, ''Information technology — Universal Coded Character Set (UCS)'' (plus amendments to that standard), w ...

(but not

Unicode Unicode, formally The Unicode Standard,The formal version reference is is an information technology standard for the consistent encoding, representation, and handling of text expressed in most of the world's writing systems. The standard, wh ...

) strings, implicit handles, and complex calculations in the variable-length string and structure paradigms already present in DCE/RPC.

Example

The DCE 1.0 reference implementation only allows such constructs as , or possibly . MSRPC allows much more complex constructs such as and even , a common expression in DCOM IDL files.

Use

MSRPC was used by Microsoft to seamlessly create a client/server model in

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, with very little effort. For example, the Windows Server domains protocols are entirely MSRPC based, as is Microsoft's DNS administrative tool.

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5.5's administrative front-ends are all MSRPC client/server applications, and its

MAPI Messaging Application Programming Interface (MAPI) is an API for Microsoft Windows which allows programs to become email-aware. While MAPI is designed to be independent of the protocol, it is usually used to communicate with Microsoft Exchange Se ...

was made more secure by "proxying" MAPI over a set of simple MSRPC functions that enable encryption at the MSRPC layer without involving the MAPI protocol.

History

MSRPC is derived from the Distributed Computing Environment 1.2 reference implementation from the

Open Software Foundation The Open Software Foundation (OSF) was a not-for-profit industry consortium for creating an open standard for an implementation of the operating system Unix. It was formed in 1988 and merged with X/Open in 1996, to become The Open Group. Despit ...

, but has been copyrighted by Microsoft. DCE/RPC was originally commissioned by the Open Software Foundation, an industry consortium to set vendor- and technology-neutral open standards for computing infrastructure. None of the

Unix Unix (; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multiuser computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, an ...

vendors (now represented by the

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), wanted to use the complex DCE or such components as DCE/RPC at the time. Microsoft's Component Object Model is based heavily on MSRPC, adding interfaces and inheritance. The marshalling semantics of DCE/RPC are used to serialize method calls and results between processes with separate address spaces, albeit COM did not initially allow network calls between different machines. With

Distributed Component Object Model Distributed Component Object Model (DCOM) is a proprietary Microsoft technology for communication between software components on networked computers. DCOM, which originally was called "Network OLE", extends Microsoft's COM, and provides the commun ...

(DCOM), COM was extended to software components distributed across several networked computers. DCOM, which originally was called "Network OLE", extends Microsoft's COM, and provides the communication substrate under Microsoft's COM+ application server infrastructure.

References

* *{{cite book , title=DCE/RPC over SMB: Samba and Windows NT Domain Internals , author=Luke Kenneth Casson Leighton , year=1999 , publisher=Sams , isbn=1-57870-150-3

External links

MSRPC at MSDN
a chapter on MSRPC from a technical article by Jean-Baptiste Marchand. Network protocols Remote procedure call Microsoft application programming interfaces