I’m currently working on two new releases of The Server Framework, the first is a simple release to add support for VS2008 and the second is the next “feature” release. Due to the number of projects and example servers and supported compilers that I test with it can take some time to finalise a release; each example server has to be checked out, built in each build configuration with each supported compiler and then the tests need to be run… Last time I did this I had planned to put aside some time to sort out an automatic build to do it for me, this time I might actually do it…
I picked up a book yesterday, Writing Secure Code for Windows Vista. Which seemed quite interesting, and was a nice slim volume that would slip into my hand luggage for my flight to Geneva on Friday night (yay first ski weekend of the season!). I’ve been flicking through it this evening and was interested in the “Standard Annotation Language” (SAL) for annotating unmanaged functions that muck around with memory buffers, it looked like a potentially easy adjustment to The Server Framework code which would possibly improve security and usability… Unfortunately it seems that SAL is only operational when you run with the /analyze compiler switch and that’s only available if you’re running an ’enterprise’ level of Visual Studio…
I removed the last version of “Norton Anti-Virus” (and all of the other stuff that I’ve been upgraded into over the years) from the last of my machines yesterday. I’ve replaced it with AVG, currently the free version to test it out.
All of the machines feel more sprightly and run faster. One of my old laptops which is now only used for fire-side web browsing is now actually usable again!
Raymond Chen has just blogged about “The importance of the FORMAT_MESSAGE_IGNORE_INSERTS flag” over on The Old New Thing. That’s another annoying bug fixed ;). I’ve occasionally wondered why I get some less than informative error messages sometimes, I wasn’t passing the flag in my GetLastErrorMessage() function and it calls itself if FormatMessage() fails and so sometimes I get an “invalid parameter” error messages when what I could get might actually be more useful to me.
I’m currently rebuilding my world with Visual Studio 2008. So far things are going ok, but as I mentioned back when I was playing with Beta 2, the new C4627 warning about header files being skipped when processing precompiled headers is a bit broken…
It seems that the code that works out if a header file is skipped (ie not included in the precompiled header but above the #pragma hdrstop line works on exact path matches rather than a file include graph.
After completing some work for client with the custom CLR hosting server I’ve started looking into a problem for another client, it’s a bit of a transition as the problem that he’s having is with a DDE connection from his server to a SCADA system that monitors the industrial plant where the server is based.
DDE was the original way that Windows programs shared data between them. It’s been around since 1987 and, well, that shows.
Sad but true… The “Typical Programmer” has a piece on Thirteen Patterns of Programmer Inverviews. I think I’ve probably been interviewed in all of these styles over the years and taken part in several of them from the interviewing side of things…
Interesting… It seems that rumours of C++’s demise in the brave new world of .Net were slightly over exagerated, perhaps, maybe…
From a recent issue of MSDN magazine:
“There are two main reasons why this column was born. First, despite the phenomenal success of the Microsoft® .NET Framework, there are still plenty of scenarios where it makes more sense to use native C++. Adoption of .NET will continue to grow, but C++ is here to stay.
I’ve just installed Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 in a VMWare box so that I can start to test the x64 port of The Server Framework with the new compiler. I haven’t bothered to look into what’s new in the 2008 C++ compiler, I’m more interested in changes to the project file format (for the tools I’m building to fix this problem) and things that may prevent my code compiling or passing its tests rather than reasons to upgrade.
I used to work with Nick at CSFB and then at Barclays Capital. He’s always been a good, techie, low-level COM/.Net geek and his latest writings on the Microsoft Concurrency and Coordination Runtime are interesting! If you’re interested in async/multi-threaded/concurrent stuff then go take a look.
