One of my clients has been reporting an intermittent issue with the deployment of new releases of their game server. This runs as a Windows service on many, many, cloud machines and, just sometimes, the service seems to have issues during start up after upgrading the code on a machine that it has otherwise been running fine on. I’ve been adding debug code to our service start up code to try and work out what’s going on and today we had our first hit.

I have just completed migrating the blog from Movable Type to Hugo. Hopefully everything still works and is in the right place, but do let me know if you find any issues. The comments have been migrated to Disqus. I’ve been wanting to update my websites for quite a while now. I spent quite a lot of effort trying to find someone to do it for me but all of the web companies seemed to lose interest when they realised that I didn’t want an ongoing “SEO” package (I’ve always viewed SEO as “snake oil”).

It felt like things almost got back to normal in 2022, which was good. We like normal… It was another good year for us and we’re still happy doing what we love, writing C++ on multiple platforms and developing interesting code for diverse clients. Our gaming clients are all doing wonderfully well; our industrial control clients are happy and planning new projects; the large American postal company that will remain nameless is looking to extend the system we built for them a few years ago and our SIP TLS Gateway project now supports secure WebSockets as well as TCP.

I’ve had a client ask if it’s possible to rename his server log file whilst the server is running but not allow deletion. This is harder than you’d expect to achieve. The established view of “the internet” is that NTFS doesn’t support permissions to allow file renaming and still prevent file deletion. This is true. If you want to allow renaming you need to create or open the file with FILE_SHARE_DELETE access and this allows rename AND delete.

As of the latest Chrome, Edge, Opera, and FireFox updates all of my ‘obsolete’ hardware (routers, NAS drives, network switches, etc) are inaccessible as they don’t use TLS 1.2. I’m unlikely to be alone in this. I can understand the technical decision but IMHO it’s wrong and, actually pretty stupid. To make it more than a click through warning to access these obsolete devices on my local subnet. Sure ban connections to other subnets (that would cause me pain too as I manage some stuff via a VPN) but 90% of users would be fine.

2021 was another “interesting” year. We hope that things worked out OK for you. We’ve stayed nice and busy doing the things we love to do. So lots more C++ on various platforms for various clients. For us, and a few of our clients, 2021 was the year that NUMA really started to be a thing. Mostly, up until now, we’ve been able to ignore NUMA hardware. Most clients scale out across cheap hardware and we’re used to dealing with that.

Back in 2009 I mused on the idea of ‘breakpoint sequences’, where a breakpoint was only hit if a series of previous breakpoints have been hit. This functionality now exists in Visual Studio 2022, and it’s wonderful. It’s useful enough for me to immediately switch from VS2017 to VS2022 as my “day to day” IDE for Windows. Normally I take forever to make the move as I have tools that manage projects and solutions across all the compilers that I support, I just develop in the one that works best for me.

We’ve just found out that an email misconfiguration means that some emails to serverframework.com email addresses have been bouncing. This should be fixed now! Sorry about the inconvenience. If you have contacted us recently and not had a reply, please try again now!

As you’ll see, we released 3 new versions of The Server Framework today. Of these, only the 7.3 release includes code changes. The 7.2 release updates almost every header file in the framework to remove ‘old style’ include guards and touches lots of source files to remove lint directives that we no longer use. This kind of change creates a lot of noise in an update and so it has been done separately to the functional changes to make it easier for users of the framework to see what has actually been changed in 7.

Version 7.4 of The Server Framework was released today. This release includes no bug fixes and no new code. It removes deprecated code and removes support for Visual Studio 2015.