I’m in a bit of a quandary. I’m writing a class that does processing on a byte stream. You poke bytes in, it does stuff, it gives you bytes out. My quandary revolves around how it gives you the bytes… The processor operates in two directions, that is, there’s an inside and an outside. It processes data traveling from inside to outside and also from outside to inside. Poking a set of bytes into the processor in one direction may or may not result in bytes being output in that direction and may or may not result in bytes being output in the other direction.

“Additional information: An operation on a socket could not be performed because the system lacked sufficient buffer space or because a queue was full” I’ve managed to get the .Net 1.1 TCP/IP issue that gives the above error mesage when trying to use sockets on .Net 1.1 fixed. Thanks to Alex Lowe for pointing me in the right direction and for the guys at MS support for allowing me to call them up and tell them I need to download the hotfix for KB 826757.

Alex Lowe asks what Microsoft could do to improve their developer support. In general I think they do a reasonable job given the huge surface area of APIs and products that need support; I think some of the MS staff blogs are helping too. But they could do more… What I’d like is more information, all of it, every scrap. :) Don’t bother cleaning it up, just make it available somewhere and let Google index it.

Roy’s post about information hoarding made me think, which is always good… Last night I followed a link from Larkware to this article on MSDN about Pocket PC services. The article annoyed me, I’d have preferred that it had been better edited, but given the choice between having the information that’s in the article available or having it sitting in someone’s mailbox waiting to be edited I know what I’d prefer.

Who are you? The new number 2… Who is number 1? Looks like Roy Osherove is making waves with his comments about MVP information hoarding… Having been in the position of being a developer searching for scraps of information on a MS technology that doesn’t appear to be documented as well as it could be I know where he’s coming from. Sometimes, during the early stages of understanding, I find that I can google for answers better than I can phrase questions.

I want some new and interesting blogs to read, so leave a comment if you have any suggestions. I subscribe to quite a few (opml file here) but I’m a bit tired of the Microsoft Employee Bleating Edge Blog stuff… Ideally I’m looking for technical blogs with a “working programmer” slant. It would be nice if they were biased towards C++ but I don’t really care. I think these guys are good, so more like this would be nice:

*There are two ways of constructing a software design; one way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult. C. A. R. Hoare* From Joel’s discussion board…

During the recent library adjustments the main aim was to add tests. As we write tests we create lots of mock objects. Our libraries are dependant on each other, as libraries tend to be, and this means that often a library uses an interface from another library… When it comes to test the dependant library it’s often handy to be able to use the mock object that you created to test the library that you’re dependant on… If you see what I mean… The, slightly labored, point being, it’s important where you keep your mock objects…

The refactoring and testing of The Server Framework code has gone pretty well. It’s not complete but at least we have some tests now and the code is broken down into slightly more cohesive lumps… Once the tests were in place and working we had to integrate the changes with the various projects that use the library; each of these projects pull the library in slightly different directions so the integration took a while.

I get quite a bit of feedback about the socket server code but I don’t really know what people are using it for. So, if you can, leave a comment or drop me a mail and tell me.