|
AND Windows Sockets DemoShield As the sophistication and complexity of software products and applications continue to increase the requirements placed on demonstrating their features and benefits also continues to grow in sophistication and complexity. Software demos and tutorials today are required not only to demonstrate feature rich products but frequently must be both multimedia and interactive. In addition, these software demos must be easy to create and easy to distribute via disk, CD, or the Internet. Demos and tutorials that can be viewed live from Internet/intranet web site will become a common requirement. At this months meeting David Bowden, DemoShield Corporation (www.demoshield.com) will discuss the latest tools and technology available to create demos for selling products, training customers and employees, or creating a front end for your CD. He will use DemoShield, their demo creation tool that lets even non-technical Windows users design interactive software demos, tutorials, and CD browsers, to illustrate the latest trends in software demos and demo development software. Windows Sockets The second presentation this month will focus on programming Windows sockets. Windows sockets provide one of the pieces you need to write network server and network client applications. With Windows sockets Delphi developers create applications that read and write over communications connections without getting involved with the details of the actual networking software. Using server sockets, a server application that provides a particular service can link to client applications that want to use that service. Using a client socket, a client application can link to the server application that provides the service. Windows socket components let Delphi applications communicate with other systems using TCP/IP and related protocols for services such as HTTP and FTP. At this months meeting Howard Shutzman, Creative Computing, will explain how the Windows socket dll works and how it can be used in Delphi applications. Topics to be covered include network server and client sockets, ports, and connections. He will demonstrate how sockets are implemented using an FTP client program developed for an EDI application that supports the exchange of invoice and billing information.The program operates under Windows 3.1 and Windows 95, and has successfully interfaced with a variety of NT, Unix, and IBM mainframe FTP servers. His presentation will also include a discussion of the Delphi 3.0 Windows network server and client socket components. |