Obviously been one of those days… I was woken before 7 this morning as Miche rushed back to work - always a bad sign when people take a wash bag with them; she’s still not home… :( I was going to go back to sleep, but, well, I was awake and thought that perhaps I’d have a doze later. No such luck… A day of merging, building and integration. Mixed in with a spot of driver updating for the TDK USB Bluetooth dongle that I have.

The latest release of the free version of my asynchronous, windows, IOCP based, socket server framework can now be obtained from here at ServerFramework.com. I’ve updated the code for two more of the socket server articles. More merging, project file updating, and testing… [NOTE: This code leaks when adjusted to build with Visual Studio 2005. This seems to be due to a bug in VS2005’s STL. See here for a workaround.

and reds and blacks and greens and, well, you get the idea. Every month when I get a shipment of disks I feel stupid. I just don’t get the way the MSDN Universal Sub is organised. I’d like a little hint card in each shipment that tells me what disks I should have in the wallet for a ‘full set’ of ‘up to date’ disks… The colours and numbers and dates and all that is probably really clever but I just don’t get it.

Michelle’s on her way home, but she’ll be working all weekend drafting an agreement that needs client sign off by Monday morning. So that’s her hair appointment down the pan and the 30th birthday party we were going to tommorrow night hosed; so the couple of hours last weekend sorting the fancy dress costumes were wasted. Note to self; make the $20 million this year and let her do the retire to a $10 million pad in Beaver Creek thing sooner rather than later.

No more zone just yet, wine’s just made me blabby. The testing I’ve just been doing with my server is real black box stuff. The build process fires off a script that kicks off the server and then runs the test harness which connects to the server and does “good stuff”, on lots of threads, until it’s done. The script then runs a server shutdown app which asks the server to clean up and go away and, well, it does.

Had one of those days where I couldn’t get started. I guess it was probably something to do with the beer last night. It was Darren’s birthday and we went to Namco on the South Bank and played on the arcade machines, drank beer, drove Dogems and generally acted Darren’s age ;) Since I couldn’t get going with what I was supposed to do today I sorted out the next socket server release and did the Windows Update dance with all of my boxes.

It’s a lovely day out there today…

The latest release of the free version of my asynchronous, windows, IOCP based, socket server framework can now be obtained from here at ServerFramework.com. For some time I’ve been promising to update the socket server articles to use the latest version of my code. Today I finally updated the code for the first article. I’m going to update the article itself soon, but in the meantime I’m posting the new code here.

The refactoring project rolls on and the code gets better. This week saw a marked change in attitute from some of the developers on the team… I was originally brought into this project because the lead developer was leaving and other developers within the team were unhappy with taking over the project as they were scared of the state that the code was in. Management accepted the need for change and welcomed the incremental improvements that my original report on the project proposed.

Why oh why couldn’t the new VS.Net solution file format have either been compatible with VS.Net 2002 or have a different file extension… I’m in the process up updating my socket server code to build with VS.Net 2003. The code already builds with both VC6 and VS.Net 2002. Since the project files for VC6 and VS.Net have different file extensions they quite happily co-exist in the same directory. Unfortunately, for whatever reason Microsoft chose to make the VS.