I’m happy to announce, after about 47 000 000 seconds of thinking and
development, release of FirebirdClient 2.5. This new shiny release
contains couple of very interesting new features:

* Implementation of Firebird 2.1 protocol improvements. These
improvements are focused on making the communication more efficient on
slow and with high latencies networks like the internet.
* Entity Framework support. Entity Framework is new, rich OR mapping
and modeling tool, sitting on the top of ADO.NET. It is store
agnostic, using ADO.NET provider to work smoothly, and the
FirebirdClient has now build-in support for it.
* Windows integrated auth. Firebird server is now able on Windows to
authenticate users using a system (ActiveDirectory, etc.), and when
you omit username and password FirebirdClient will try to negotiate
with server this kind of authentication.
* Timeout for wait transactions.

Of course, this release contains also lot of bug fixes and performance
improvements. You can see the most important on
http://tracker.firebirdsql.org/sr/jira.issueviews:searchrequest-printable/temp/SearchRequest.html?&pid=10003&fixfor=10170&fixfor=10340&fixfor=10261&fixfor=10240&fixfor=10230&status=5&status=6&sorter/field=issuekey&sorter/order=DESC&tempMax=1000.
I’m also happy to say, that we have again full set of builds available
for download. You can download build for .NET 3.5 (and unit tests),
.NET 2.0, Compact Framework, Mono (Linux build) and also ASP.NET web
providers.

One of the early adopters, SMS-Timing, of Entity Framework support for
Firebird comments:
“Thanks to Jiri’s (www.x2develop.com) work the Firebird .NET Data
Provider made a lot of progress and is now even supporting the Entity
Framework. Because of the adaptations we were able to use the newest
.NET technologies in a modern programming environment together with a
well known Firebird Database. In our industry (entertainment) the
customers expect new and exciting software, and therefore the
development tools need to be cutting edge. These developments in
Firebird have a big impact on our products, and we hope that it brings
the same boost to the Firebird Community itself. A preview of our
newest software: www.fast4thefuture.com,
www.sms-timing.com/en/software_kiosk.php.”

You can download the new version on
http://www.firebirdsql.org/index.php?op=files&id=netprovider.


--
Jiri {x2} Cincura (CTO x2develop.com)
http://blog.vyvojar.cz/jirka/ | http://www.ID3renamer.com