We have a new client profile available here for a new client who selected The Server Framework to help it expand its online gaming platform to incorporate a WebSockets interface.

We’ve just released a new version of WASP, our pluggable application server platform. This release is built with release 6.5.2 of The Server Framework and includes support for secure TCP connections using SSL/TLS via our SChannel Option pack. Setting up a secure TCP endpoint with WASP is easy, simply add the Secure configuration option to the <EndPoint> node like this: <?xml version="1.0" encoding="Windows-1252"?> <Configuration> <WASP> <TCP> <Endpoints> <EndPoint Name="Echo Server" Port="5050" HandlerDLL="[CONFIG]\EchoServer.

Version 6.5.2 of The Server Framework was released today. This release adds some new functionality to the WebSockets Option pack and fixes some bugs in code that is only currently used by the WebSockets Option pack. If you have 6.5 or 6.5.1 and you are not using WebSockets then you probably don’t need this release. This release includes the following, see the release notes, here, for full details of all changes.

We are dropping support for Visual Studio .Net 2002 from release 6.6 of The Server Framework which is due early next year. We don’t expect that this will cause anyone any problems as this compiler became unsupported by Microsoft in 2009, and most native C++ people seemed to skip this release entirely. We are also considering dropping support for Visual Studio .Net 2003. This compiler is still supported by Microsoft until 2013 but we expect that most people interested in native C++ will have switched to Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 at the earliest opportunity.

We have a new client profile available here for a client that we’ve had since 2006 and who use The Server Framework in their equity trading systems.

One of the things that allows the Windows 8 Registered I/O Networking Extensions, RIO, to perform better than normal Winsock calls is the fact that the memory used for I/O operations is pre-registered with the API. This allows RIO to do all the necessary checks that the buffer memory is valid, etc. once, and then lock the buffer in memory until you de-register it. Compare this to normal Winsock networking where the memory needs to be checked and locked on each operation and already we have a whole load of work that simply isn’t required for each I/O operation.

In my last blog post I introduced the Windows 8 Registered I/O Networking Extensions, RIO. As I explained there are three ways to retrieve completions from RIO, polled, event driven and via an I/O Completion Port (IOCP). This makes RIO pretty flexible and allows it to be used in many different designs of servers. The polled scenario is likely aimed at very high performance UDP or High Frequency Trading style situations where you may be happy to burn CPU so as to process inbound datagrams as fast as possible.

Before I started to look at RIO for inclusion in The Server Framework I did a quick check on the Microsoft BUILD site to see if there were any sessions that dealt with it specifically, I didn’t find any. Once I posted my blog posting I did another check and found this video that deals specifically with RIO. This gives some in depth details of how RIO works and the kinds of performance improvements that Microsoft has witnessed in their labs.

Most of the buzz being generated around the Windows 8 Developer Previews at the moment seems to be centred on the new Metro user interface and the Windows Runtime. Whilst both Metro and WinRT are key components of the next Windows release I find the Registered I/O Networking Extensions to be far more interesting, but then I guess I would… What are the Registered I/O Networking Extensions? The Registered I/O Networking Extensions, RIO, is a new API that has been added to Winsock to support high-speed networking for increased networking performance with lower latency and jitter.

Some stream protocols have the concept of ‘out of band’ (OOB) data. This is a separate logical communication channel between the peers which enables data that is unrelated to the current data in the stream to be sent alongside the normal data stream. This is often a way for some data to jump ahead of the normal stream and arrive faster than if it were delivered via the the normal data stream.