November 2005
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Practical Testing: 15 - Testing payback
Last year I wrote a series of articles called “Practical Testing” where I took a piece of complicated multi-threaded code and wrote tests for it. I then rebuild the code from scratch in a test driven development style to show … -
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RSS feeds for Microsoft Knowledge Base articles
This is quite nice, a whole list of finely targetted RSS feeds for Knowledge Base articles for various products. -
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Windows TCP/IP Server Performance
For the last week or so I’ve been working on measuring and improving the performance of The Server Framework. The latest release of the free version of my asynchronous, windows, IOCP based, socket server framework can now be obtained … -
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Simple Echo Servers
A long time ago when I wrote my first article on high performance TCP/IP servers for Windows using IO Completion ports over on CodeProject I complained that “Also the more complicated examples, ones that used IO completion ports for … -
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TCP/IP Server Failures
One of the good things about the server performance testing that I’ve been doing recently is that I have been able to witness some rather rare failure conditions in action and seen how The Server Framework handles them. When using IO … -
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Visual C++ 2005 cannot build dynamically linked applications for NT4 deployment
Jochen Kalmbach has discovered a problem with dynamically linked applications built with VC2005 running (or not running!) on NT 4. I guess this isn’t going to bite that many people… Read about it here. -
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What's your worst bug?
“Because of a subtle bug called a “race condition,” a quick-fingered typist could accidentally configure the Therac-25 so the electron beam would fire in high-power mode but with the metal X-ray target out of position. At … -
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Bad Managers?
Alan Green doesn’t like the word “manager” used as a class name suffix. His point seems to be that “manager” is imprecise and instead he suggests a list of alternative suffixes with more precise meaning; though … -
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Profilers and The Perils of Micro-Optimization
Ian Griffiths has just written a nice piece on profiling .Net code and why the obvious things that people do are often very wrong: “Unfortunately, lots of developers just love to go off on micro-benchmarking exercises, where they … -
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Controlling Time, Take 2
Recently I finished developing a high performance ISO-8583 financial transaction authorisation server for a client using The Server Framework and whilst I was running the final black-box tests against the server I realised that these … -
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Too much encapsulation reduces the ability to multiplex?
Every now and then I come across a situation where encapsulation has been taken slightly too far. Usually, or at least most recently, these over encapsulated designs have had problems because they’ve blocked access to an event handle. … -
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Why are the 'event' classes in .Net STILL broken?
Whilst I’m ranting about the little things… You still can’t create named versions of the .Net ManualResetEvent and AutoResetEvent, even in .Net 2.0. Wasn’t everything going to be fixed in Whidbey? Of course, I … -
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I don't like Vanilla Scoble
Robert Scoble, the “Microsoft Geek blogger”, has recently had a complaint that he only writes about Microsoft and he figured that he was in a rut and decided to get out of his rut by deliberately not writing about his usual … -
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More on Windows Networking resource limit server failures
My VoIP client has been stress testing the UDP version of The Server Framework and they had what they thought was a deadlock. It wasn’t a deadlock it was more of a lazy server… What seemed to have happened is that they had been … -
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Kevin Barnes on TDD
Kevin Barnes over at Code Craft has just written an interesting piece on TDD. In it he claims that “Excessive unit testing infrastructure hampers your practical ability to refactor things efficiently. People scream at me when I say … -
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Hosting problems
As you may have noticed I’m having some hosting problems at present. The server that hosts www.lenholgate.com was hacked and it’s taking my hosting provider longer to fix than they expected… Right now comments and … -
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Hosting problems resolved
It looks like all of the hosting problems are now resolved. There was a brief period when the database and CGI were fixed and an MT configuration path hadn’t been updated so pages were not being rebuilt after comments were added but … -
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Testing Windows Services
Mark Pearce writes about Debugging a .Net Windows Service from within the IDE. We do something similar with our C++ Windows services but, as you’ve probably come to expect from me, it’s slightly more complicated than … -
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Udi Dahan on Physical Design
Udi Dahan writes about managing dependencies in code at the ‘package’ level in “So many Dlls, so little time”. “Sloppiness with dependencies. If two classes are independent of each other, and do not provide …