Ah, sometimes I just love that younger me for getting to the point… More here, thanks to Daniel Tarbotton for reminding me of things I said in the past… And, for a change, it seems that someone agrees! ;)

Version 6.5.6 of The Server Framework was released today. This release contains some bug fixes, a selection of minor improvements and improved support for the Visual Studio 2012 (Note that there will be a further release shortly after Visual Studio 2012’s RTM if needed to address any changes between the Release Candidate and the RTM versions). If you use either the Read Timeout filter or the Flow Control filter then you should install this update.

As I mentioned back in March I’m now doing some RIO performance testing with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet link as I couldn’t push my test server hard enough with multiple 1 Gigabit links. This involves 2 Intel 10 Gigabit AT2 cards connected directly to each other. One of the cards is in our test server and the other has been tried in various other pieces of test hardware in an attempt to ramp up the bandwidth usage for the RIO tests.

My baby son Max was born today, July 6th 2012, at 4.51pm. He weighed 8lb 1oz and both he and his wonderful mother are doing fine.

The recent changes to 6.5.5 so that JetByteTools::Socket::CReadTimeoutStreamSocketConnectionFilter holds a socket reference when the timer is set causes problems when the socket is shutdown. The filter doesn’t see the shutdown and fails to cancel the timer which means that a reference is held on the socket until the timeout expires. This delays socket closure and causes your timeout handling code to be run on a socket which has been cleanly shut down.

We’ve been retained by HTI Labs to provide ongoing technical consultancy, mentoring, and assistance for their consultants.

As I mentioned in the release notes for version 6.5.5, The Server Framework now supports Visual Studio 11 Beta. It also supports Visual Studio 2012 RC but there are a couple of new warnings that you may need to suppress in Warnings.h. I haven’t been able to locate and details of the differences in the native code generation and C++ compiler side of Visual Studio 2012 RC from what was present in Visual Studio 11 Beta.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’m running Windows Server 2012 RC with my Intel 10 Gigabit AT2 adapters. I’ve had several emails asking me where I got the drivers from as the latest Intel drivers do not install. Whilst it’s true that you can’t currently run the downloaded driver exe, PROWinx64.exe on Windows Server 2012 RC (or anything later than Win7). You CAN unzip the exe (it’s just an executable zip file) and then simply use the device manager to update the driver and then browse to the directory that you unzipped the exe into.

I’m still working on my investigation of the Windows Registered I/O network extensions, RIO, which I started back in October when they became available with the Windows 8 Developer Preview. I’ve improved my test system a little since I started and now have a point to point 10 Gigabit network between my test machines using two 2 Intel 10 Gigabit AT2 cards wired back to back. My test system isn’t symmetrical, that is I have a much more powerful machine on one end of the link than on the other.

I’ve been watching Bartosz Milewski’s C++ 11 Concurrency videos and they’re a pretty good way to get up to speed on the new threading support in the latest C++ standard. They start off nice and slowly, for people who haven’t been doing concurrency for years, and explain the various new features provided by the language. It’s good stuff. I’ve been reading Anthony Williams’ C++ Concurrency In action which is a great way to understand the details of what you’ll see in the videos.