Back in 2004 I started a series of blog posts called “Practical Testing”, about unit testing a non-trivial piece of C++ code. The idea was to show how adding unit tests to existing, real-world, code could be useful and could support future development and refactoring. Episodes 1 though 13 were written in 2004 and covered getting the code under test and fixing some bugs that were complicated to reproduce in a live environment.
I’ve finally done what I should have done several years ago and shut down the LockExplorer site.
I haven’t had the time required to keep the tool up to date and fewer people were interested than I originally expected.
I may make the source code available at some point.
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”).
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.
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.
As I mentioned in May last year, I’d was having trouble with a client’s system where a UDP DDOS was causing Windows Server machines to use all available non-paged pool and then blue screen.
The issue could be reproduced with, what I thought at the time was, a minimal test program that simply created a UDP socket, bound it to a port and then didn’t do anything with it. If something sent a stream of datagrams to that port then non-paged pool usage would grow in an uncontrolled manner until the box became unusable and eventually died.
Back in October 2019 I pointed out that I didn’t normally do roadmaps of where the framework was going but did one anyway. Looking at how long it has taken to get from there to here I think I’m generally correct not to do roadmaps… I’ve been very busy with client work and the pandemic has caused us some disruption, but thankfully not too much. However, I think the main reason that it has taken so long to get the 7.
UPDATED: 23 August 2021 see here
As I mentioned a while ago, it seems there’s a strangely fatal bug in the Windows networking stack at present. This manifests as massive non-paged pool memory usage if a process creates a UDP socket, binds it to an address and fails to read from it faster than other people are writing to it. The issue appears to be present on all current Windows operating systems but is NOT present on Windows Server 2012 R2 if recent patches have NOT been applied but IS present as soon as the box is patched up to date… My test box was patched up until March 2020 and ran fine, as soon as it was patched to June 2020 it started to behave badly.
UPDATED: 23 August 2021 see here
One of my clients runs game servers on the cloud. They have an AWFUL lot of them and have run them for a long time. Every so often they have problems with DDOS attacks on their servers. They have upstream DDOS protection from their hosting providers but these take a while to recognise the attacks and so there’s usually a period when the servers are vulnerable.
