Programming Life

One of the major fights I had while making a jump from Delphi programming to C# and .NET was the one related to embedded databases. In Delphi there are many options and I’ve used most of them in my programming endeavors. On the other side, .NET  seems poor by comparison. However, I discovered that one of the solutions I used with Delphi also supports .NET languages.

Firebird project seems to have an embeddable library for .NET available. I’ve successfully used Firebird database in my Delphi projects in the past and it was the perfect solution for a client-server architecture I’ve developed.

This database engine has a strong community behind it and it’s  continuously developed further and further. Also, there are a lot of tools to manage firebird databases, some of them completely free. Deployment of a Firebird based application is simplified as the entire database is encapsulated in one single file and the actual DB engine consists of a single dll.

As a bonus, Firebird has one of the most relaxed license possible (basically you can use it for whatever purposes) .

So, long story short,  for anybody looking for an embeddable database for .NET just check the Firebird Project’s page .

Recently I found an annoying problem when I find out that our video conference software cannot do desktop sharing on computers that have no public IP.
We decided to build a VNC Proxy that can be controlled using some commands.
The task got a little bit complicated when you think that this proxy is supposed to support multiple conferences each with multiple clients at the same time.
So, using my good old friend Delphi 7 (especially TServerSocket component) we’ve managed to implement the VNC Proxy. Testing revealed that this solution is viable although the speed is a little bit slower than on direct IP access (as all data is transferred via proxy server).
Ahh … just a remainder for all of you searching the TServerSocket component:
By default this package is not installed in Delphi 7, so:
Component >> install packages >> Add button >> select C:\Program Files\Borland\Delphi7\Bin\dclsockets70.bpl.

Right now, the FLASH videocenferencing application allows desktop sharing(limited or full control) on any computer, public IP or not.
For those of you interested in the real project, you can test the results on http://demo.streamingbase.com.