🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello!

I'm going to attemt to write a small application that will run on several
Windows sessions simultanously on a network (Novell). The applications
should use a file to communicate, and they would all update this file at
irregular intervals. Each instance of the program is only interested in 
its own part of that file, but a different program will read the whole file 
at fixed intervals (5-10 secs). My questions are therefore:

One problem is locking the file, theoretically blocking some
of the programs off "forever". 

1. Are there any libraries for easily maintaining what could be 
   considered a tiny (minute...) database like this? (Record locking
   instead of file locking etc)

2. Does any of the major compilers have anything that might
   resolve this in an efficient way?

3. Are there better ways of communicating data across a network under 
   windows? We're talking tiny amounts of data here, say 80 chars every
   5 mins - 1 hour per application.

Language/compiler not decided yet, could be anything from VB2 to BC++
depending on what might have the right tools/libraries for this task.

Answers by email preferred, although I read this group as well. Just
hoping I won't miss any of the replies. (So many newsgroups, so little
time... :-)

				Olav Kolbu