Version 7.3 of The Server Framework was released today. This release includes bug fixes and new code. As always, see the release notes here, for full details of all changes. Bug fixes: Fixed a bug with JetByteTools::Core::CCallbackTimerWheel which would show up if the time provider was providing ticks at a different granularity than the granularity of the wheel. Fixed a bug in CDatagramSocketConnectionManager and CDatagramSocketServer where the buffers returned in write and sendTo completion callbacks had an incorrect number of bytes set as ‘used’.

Version 7.2 of The Server Framework was released today. This release includes no bug fixes and no new code. It adds support for Visual Studio 2022 and removes redundant manual include guards from most header files and removes unused “lint” directives from some of the older files. As such this release just serves as a stepping stone to the 7.3 release and makes it easier to see the changes that are made in the 7.

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.

Version 7.1 of The Server Framework was released today. This release includes no bug fixes but begins to apply transformations that will allow code to compile on different platforms. The next release, 7.2, will add in functional changes and bug fixes. If you haven’t yet migrated to 7.x, please see the 7.0 release notes. There will be no more releases of the 6.9.x release stream. As always, see the release notes here, for full details of all changes.

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.

Version 7.0 of The Server Framework was released today. This release includes no functional changes or bug fixes but moves code that could compile on different platforms out of the Win32Tools library and into a new CoreTools library. It also updates all include paths to use / rather than \ as / is valid on Unix-based systems and also on Windows. The next release, 7.1, will begin to move the code towards cross platform compilation and the release after that will add in functional changes and bug fixes.

Version 6.9.5 of The Server Framework was released today. This release includes changes to support Visual Studio 2019 (16.5 - 16.9), some new functionality and a bug fixes. As always, see the release notes here, for full details of all changes. Bug fixes: Bug fix in JetByteTools::SChannel::CServerContext::ContinueHandshake() so that we return HandshakeFatalError and set the last status correctly on failure rather than throwing an exception. This allows us to correctly report, or not, the issue to the other side.

2020 was probably a challenging year for everyone. We were especially lucky in that all of our loved ones managed to stay safe and healthy and our working style was easy to adjust to fit with the various challenges of the year. We hope that things worked out OK for you too. We ended up having a fairly good year. The games companies using The Server Framework were busy and had lots of work to send our way.

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.