The latest release of The Server Framework, which is due later this month, adds support for Visual Studio 2013 and Windows 8.1 as well as a host of other major changes.

As we first mentioned here, release 6.6 of The Server Framework removes support for Visual Studio .Net (2002) and Visual Studio .Net (2003). The 2002 compiler is no longer supported by Microsoft and the 2003 compiler becomes unsupported in October this year. To be honest, I’m very pleased to see the back of them. Hopefully most users of the framework are using at least Visual Studio 2005, if you’re not, get in touch now.

It seems that `isprint() is broken. The following program demonstrates the problem. In VS20013 it prints “test failed” in all previous versions of visual studio it prints “test passed”. From this reference: http://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/string/byte/isprint it seems that VS2013 is broken. I’ve opened a Microsoft Connect issue for this. #include <ctype.h> #include <iostream> int main() { int c = 9; if (isprint(c)) { std::cout << "test failed" << std::endl; } else { std::cout << "test passed" << std::endl; } return 1; }

We have a new client profile available here for a new Chinese client who uses The Server Framework to build servers for its GIS applications for the Oil and Gas industry.

I have recently been sent a couple of ebooks to review. It seems people at Packt Publishing think that I’d be a good person to review their C++ books… Anyway, bear in mind that this ebook was given to me for free and that I was asked to review it… Instant Windows 8 C++ Application Development How-to is a short book, but then that’s what the “Instant” range of books are supposed to be.

We have a new client profile available here for a new client who selected The Server Framework to build the servers for its iOS and Android games.

Due to masses of attempted comment spam which was causing my hosting provider’s server some problems I’ve disabled comments for a while. Email me if you have something you’d like added and I’ll sort it out for you. Update - 13/5/13 - comments enabled again…

On the 3rd of May 2003 I posted the first entry on this blog. I then proceeded to “back fill” the blog with various things that had either been posted before in other places or had been laying around waiting for me to have somewhere to put them. This is why although the blog began in 2003 the archives go back to 1992. Things have changed quite a lot since then, both in terms of blogging and my life.

Back in January 2010 I discovered that if FILE_SKIP_COMPLETION_PORT_ON_SUCCESS is enabled on a datagram socket and a datagram arrives when a read is NOT currently pending and the datagram is bigger than the buffer supplied to the next read operation then no error is returned and the read will never complete. This was confirmed as a Windows bug and I’m pleased to see that it’s been fixed in Windows 8 and Server 2012.

Release 6.6 of The Server Framework includes some breaking changes to both the IService, IServiceCallbacks and IShutdownService interfaces. Many functions now return an ServiceTools::ExitCode, either directly or by value, which allows you to fine tune the exit code returned from your service under failure conditions. This exit code is reported to the Service Control Manager (SCM) when your service shuts down and also returned from the exe if you run the service as a normal exe.