The ADO Component Checker

Team-Fly

---

Okay, so you just installed Visual Basic 6.0 SP3. Since you got it just last week, you assume it has the latest version of ADO, right? But do you know for sure which version of MDAC (thus ADO) you have installed on your development system, on your server, or on your client's system? Want to find out? Well as Yoda would say, "You will… you will." (Incidentally, Visual Basic 6.0 SP3 installs an older version of ADO 2.1—not the final "GA" release of ADO 2.1.)

However, you're in luck—the (Microsoft) Component Checker tool is designed to help you find out everything you want to know about MDAC (and perhaps some things you would rather not know). Component Checker runs on these operating systems: Microsoft Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, and Windows 2000. Only 32-bit and 64-bit platforms are supported.

Component Checker is a customizable tool that performs the following tasks:

• Identifies the current MDAC installation on a computer.
• Creates a series of reports about the files identified for the current MDAC installation.
• (Optionally) removes the current MDAC installation after listing .dll conflicts and identifying programs that reference a given .dll.

Performing this last task is not always possible. After an ADO version is installed, such as ADO 2.1, the applications that depend on it will not work correctly (if at all) with an older ADO version. My understanding is that after ADO 2.5 is installed, it cannot be uninstalled—it becomes an integral part of the OS.

Note 

I installed ADO 2.1 (GA) on my new Visual Basic 6.0 SP3 system and ran the Component Checker. It turned up about a dozen difugelties^[1]—a couple of missing Registry entries and a whole slew of "wrong version" errors. I tried the same thing after installing ADO 2.5. Ditto. Scary. They're working on it—or so they say.

^[1]Difugelties: (ancient computer term). Bug, error, screw-up, FUBAR.

---

Team-Fly