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 server without you needing to do anything special; it's what the flow control filter uses to provide efficient TCP window based flow control; it's what the compression filter uses to compress your data stream; it's what the read timeout filter uses to provide you with asynchronous read timeouts on overlapped I/O and what the connection re-establishment filter uses to automatically…

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 belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way". In short - debugging…

I've complained about DevPartner Studio enough in the past (here, here, here, etc.) that I thought I should write a positive blog posting since my recent experiences have been very positive. Some time ago I reported a bug in the BoundsChecker part of the product which meant that it hung sometimes in multi-threaded code. I managed to get a reasonably straight forward reproduction and raised an issue with them. It took a while but this is now fixed in 9.1 and this alone makes the product much more usable for me - having your diagnostic tool hang is never that…