1.1 Glossary

This document uses the following terms:

American National Standards Institute (ANSI) character set: A character set defined by a code page approved by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI). The term "ANSI" as used to signify Windows code pages is a historical reference and a misnomer that persists in the Windows community. The source of this misnomer stems from the fact that the Windows code page 1252 was originally based on an ANSI draft, which became International Organization for Standardization (ISO) Standard 8859-1 [ISO/IEC-8859-1]. In Windows, the ANSI character set can be any of the following code pages: 1252, 1250, 1251, 1253, 1254, 1255, 1256, 1257, 1258, 874, 932, 936, 949, or 950. For example, "ANSI application" is usually a reference to a non-Unicode or code-page-based application. Therefore, "ANSI character set" is often misused to refer to one of the character sets defined by a Windows code page that can be used as an active system code page; for example, character sets defined by code page 1252 or character sets defined by code page 950. Windows is now based on Unicode, so the use of ANSI character sets is strongly discouraged unless they are used to interoperate with legacy applications or legacy data.

ANSI character: An 8-bit Windows-1252 character set unit.

data message (or message): Data exchanged between an application running on a terminal services server and a dynamic virtual channel (DVC) listeners running on a TS client. The maximum length of a data message is 2^32 – 1 bytes.

dynamic virtual channel: A transport used for lossless communication between an RDP client and a server component over a main data connection, as specified in [MS-RDPEDYC].

Dynamic Virtual Channel (DVC) Listener (or Listener): A named endpoint registered at the TS client during initialization of a DVC.  DVC listeners are service providers to the applications that run on a TS server.

dynamic virtual channel (DVC) manager: An application that runs on the TS servers and clients. They manage the initialization, creation, and closing of DVCs. They are responsible for maintaining established channels and for transferring messages between the applications on the TS servers and the DVC listeners that run on the TS clients.

listener: A session running on a terminal server that listens for incoming connection requests.

priority class: The priority of a group of channels. Channels of a higher priority class will typically be allotted a larger proportion of available bandwidth than those of a lower class.

static virtual channel: A static transport used for lossless communication between a client component and a server component over a main data connection, as specified in [MS-RDPBCGR].

terminal services (TS): A service on a server computer that allows delivery of applications, or the desktop itself, to various computing devices. When a user runs an application on a terminal server, the application execution takes place on the server computer and only keyboard, mouse, and display information is transmitted over the network. Each user sees only his or her individual session, which is managed transparently by the server operating system and is independent of any other client session.

virtual channel: A communication channel available in a TS server session between applications running at the server and applications running on the TS client.

MAY, SHOULD, MUST, SHOULD NOT, MUST NOT: These terms (in all caps) are used as defined in [RFC2119]. All statements of optional behavior use either MAY, SHOULD, or SHOULD NOT.