http://www.lenholgate.com/ Len Holgate's thoughts on this and that... Mainly test driven software development in C++ on Windows platforms... - Socket Servers en-us Len.Holgate@JetByte.com 2010-01-14T12:19:25+00:00 hourly 1 2000-01-01T12:00+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000890.html I'm just finishing a batch of work that will be included in the 6.2 release of my IOCP based, high performance windows client and server framework and which improves the performance of the framework. There are two main improvements; the... Posted by Len at 12:19 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 890@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2010-01-14T12:19:25+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000889.html As I mentioned a while back I've been looking at incorporating some simple performance gains in the framework by following the advice given over at the Windows Server Performance Team Blog. Specifically the advice from part three of the "Designing... Posted by Len at 12:45 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 889@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2010-01-06T12:45:41+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000887.html Charles Dickens said it best in A Tale of Two Cities; "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of... Posted by Len at 04:50 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 887@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-12-23T16:50:15+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000886.html The filtering API that's built into the stream (i.e. TCP) side of the licensed framework is pretty powerful. It's what the OpenSSL, SChannel and SSPI Negotiate filters use to transform the data as it flows into and out of your... Posted by Len at 06:04 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 886@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-12-11T18:04:02+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000885.html I've been spending a little time recently writing a custom Wireshark dissector plugin for the UDT protocol. This didn't prove to be that difficult once I got over the initial problem of actually getting the Wireshark source to build with... Posted by Len at 12:05 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Geek Speak , Socket Servers ]]> 885@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-26T12:05:06+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000884.html As I mentioned a while back the CLR Hosting API has changed with .Net 4.0. The new API allows you much more flexibility in loading CLR runtimes and also allows you to load and run multiple different runtimes in a... Posted by Len at 06:04 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 884@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-25T18:04:15+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000883.html The licensed version of my freely available I/O Completion Port based, high performance, Windows networking framework provides a whole host of features that the free code doesn't; aside from performance improvements, bug fixes and an active support and development process.... Posted by Len at 12:27 PM | Comments (2) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 883@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-25T12:27:07+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000882.html Compressing TCP (and reliable UDP) streams is one of the things that often comes up in discussion with clients and I've helped several people implement stream compression using the TCP stream filtering API that's part of the server framework. The... Posted by Len at 02:03 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 882@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-17T14:03:18+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000881.html The latest release of the licensed version of the socket server framework is now available. This release includes the following changes. Note that this is mainly a bug fix release. The following changes were made to the libraries. Admin Library... Posted by Len at 12:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 881@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-16T12:06:45+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000880.html In the great tradition of explaining your problem to someone else as a way of fixing it yourself without their help... I've nailed the rotating file log 16010101 bug! The problem was to do with the fact that when there... Posted by Len at 10:00 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 880@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-05T22:00:46+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000879.html It's been a bit of a week for bugs. First I had a bug report for the really rather old CodeProject socket server COM object. This allows people using VB to create a socket server that uses the free version... Posted by Len at 07:29 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 879@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-11-05T19:29:20+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000878.html I'm currently looking at the new concurrency profiling tools that come with Visual Studio 2010. It's interesting and useful stuff. The tools provide what I have attempted to develop in the past by using API Hooking but it's vastly superior... Posted by Len at 02:18 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 878@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-10-29T14:18:43+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000877.html I've been playing with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 and .Net 4.0, building code, running tests, playing with the IDE, etc. The first issue that I've come across with my existing codebase is that the .Net 2.0 hosting APIs (such... Posted by Len at 11:38 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: CLR Hosting , Socket Servers ]]> 877@http://www.lenholgate.com/ CLR Hosting 2009-10-23T11:38:07+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000873.html There are some interesting blog posts by Rick Vicik over on the Windows Server Performance Team Blog. Most interesting for me is part three of the three part series on "Designing Applications for High Performance". Whilst parts one and two... Posted by Len at 09:36 AM | Comments (3) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 873@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-09-09T09:36:14+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000871.html The release notes for the 6.1 release, whilst complete, don't really highlight the key points of this release. These are as follows: Support for SSPI Negotiate (NTLM and Kerberos) servers and clients - You can now license code which allows... Posted by Len at 06:30 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 871@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-09-07T18:30:32+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000870.html The latest release of the licensed version of the socket server framework is now available. This release includes the following changes. The following changes were made to the libraries. Admin Library - 6.1 We now suppress warning 4370, 'layout of... Posted by Len at 11:22 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 870@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-09-04T23:22:31+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000867.html The server framework uses reference counted data buffers and socket objects. These are passed around as part of the asynchronous I/O system in the framework and as they're placed in queues or passed from one thread to another their reference... Posted by Len at 01:42 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 867@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-09-03T13:42:31+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000865.html A customer of mine has been having some problems with communication between a UDP server and their load test client. The UDP server implements the ENet protocol which provides for reliable data transfer over UDP. Their problem was manifesting as... Posted by Len at 11:52 AM | Comments (2) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 865@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-08-19T11:52:25+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000862.html I'm developing the simple client server protocol code that I'm harvesting in a test driven manner. Although the code exists, as such, and I'm harvesting it rather than inventing it from scratch the harvesting is taking the "best" ideas from... Posted by Len at 02:02 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers , Testing ]]> 862@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-08-06T14:02:10+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000861.html The simple client/server request/response protocol that I'm currently harvesting uses the concept of an 'invocation' to tie a request to a response. An id is generated on the client and placed in the request header. The server simply copies the... Posted by Len at 08:35 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 861@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-08-06T08:35:07+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000860.html Quite often my customers use the server framework for both ends of their communication channels. The framework has fully supported developing clients as well as servers for a long time now and although many of my customers build either servers... Posted by Len at 01:04 PM | Comments (1) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 860@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-08-05T13:04:51+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000855.html I've been working on a library that works in a similar way to our SChannel code and allows the use of the Microsoft "Negotiate" Security Support Provider Interface (SSPI) to provide NTLM and Kerberos support (see SPNEGO for more details).... Posted by Len at 09:04 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 855@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-22T21:04:37+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000854.html As of the next release of the server framework use of catch(...) handlers at thread boundaries, in 'no throw' functions and in destructors will be configurable. At present, in v6.0 and earlier of the server framework, we use catch(...) judiciously... Posted by Len at 10:03 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 854@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-19T10:03:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000853.html Back in October 2007 I briefly looked at, what seemed to be at the time, a simple change to the server framework so that you had the option to use buffers that were aligned to page boundaries. This could help... Posted by Len at 07:20 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 853@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-14T19:20:08+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000852.html I've had a couple of requests from clients recently that they be able to handle any structured exceptions in the server framework themselves. Up until now all framework threads install a SEH translator and catch the resulting C++ exceptions in... Posted by Len at 09:30 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 852@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-13T09:30:16+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000851.html Here's a nice piece by Rico Mariani about why Visual Studio is unlikely to go 64 bit any time soon. In a nut shell, unless you have very large data sets that need to be kept in memory you might... Posted by Len at 02:06 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 851@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-11T14:06:55+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000850.html I'm currently working on a new version of the Windows Services library that ships as part of the Licensed I/O Completion Port Server Framework. The Services library allows you to turn your server into a Windows Service very easily and... Posted by Len at 09:48 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 850@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-10T09:48:28+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000848.html There's a race condition in the service shutdown code which is most likely to show up if there's an exception thrown from your implementation of ContinueService(), PauseService() or StopService() but that could show up during any service shutdown sequence. This... Posted by Len at 09:47 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 848@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-01T09:47:41+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000847.html There's a bug in all releases of our performance counter library that may cause the creation of an instance with a name that has been previously used as an instance but that has been released to fail by connecting the... Posted by Len at 08:59 AM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 847@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-06-01T08:59:14+00:00 http://www.lenholgate.com/archives/000843.html Often when you're writing a server or client application with the framework you will find yourself needing to perform operations periodically or after a timeout. The framework provides a light weight timer queue that can be used to schedule timers... Posted by Len at 01:25 PM | Comments (0) | Categories: Socket Servers ]]> 843@http://www.lenholgate.com/ Socket Servers 2009-05-05T13:25:49+00:00