About two weeks ago I published on CodeProject.com the article called WCF Client Server Application with Custom Authentication, Authorization, Encryption and Compression. 

It offers solution to this complex situation (very unlikely that you’ll have all these constraints):

- Client-server application – http protocol – NO IIS
- Authentication – user/password from a database – NO SSL/X509 certificate
- Authorization – roles from a database
- Encryption for the credentials (with option for the entire request/response)
- Compression for both the request and response.

It is in 2 parts, part 1 contains the logic, considerations about WCF and security, how to use the code. The second part contains explanations about the implementation.

I was surprised by the large numbers of views (more than 15.000), because there are few WCF readers compared with ASP.NET readers for example (this can be seen extremely well in the percentage of WCF monthly published articles on codeproject – about 1%).  Probably a big contribution had the fact that the article quickly became first on google and bing searches for wcf client server keywords (though I don’t know how long it will stay there).

Hence, the article had more than 60 codeproject bookmarks and more than 20 comments – most of the comments praising the organization and the explanations. And it ranked 5 (so far) in March popularity top (from about 400 articles).

I'm sure that 90% of the people that read this article won't use it in this form (all things combined together); some will use only the custom authentication/authorization; some the encryption and some the compression - as starting examples for their specific projects.

As predicted a few posts ago, VistaDb find itself a buyer: Gibraltar Software.

I think this was a brilliant marketing move from Gibraltar. They become known more which will increase the selling of their products regardless of what they decide to do with VistaDb.

VistaDb is closing their office as its founder states here.

I was one of the many that wasn’t seduced by VistaDb. I did take it into consideration along SqlCe and SQLite for an application. Though I was impressed the most by SQLite I end up using SqlCE because of better date/time manipulation and it was integrated in Visual Studio; also because I anticipated a better implication of Microsoft in the forthcoming releases as it will be a necessary piece in the battle to occupy the mobile devices software.

At that time VistaDB had the worst stats in benchmarks, wasn’t free like the others, and it was at its infancy. So it had no chance in choosing it.

Looking now at their features (if they really work as advertised), it is an impressive piece of software that probably took a lot of development time – mostly high quality development time (building something like VistaDB this is not the same thing as dragging and dropping a few controls on the form and binding them to a data source). 

And since it is closing down it can be purchased for almost nothing.

Therefore I think that there will be a buyer. And VistaDB will not Rest In Peace; at least not so soon.