WCF replacement for cross process/machine communication

I ran across another post of someone looking to get rid of WCF on StackOverflow today. The post titled “WCF replacement for cross process/machine communication” goes into the typical complaints about configuration of WCF. I actually think this is the least of the issues I’ve had with WCF. Whatever your reason for looking to abandon [...]

 

Recently I ran across an article on the subject of Content Management Systems and their inability to separate content editing from content publishing. The article titled “EditingPublishingSeparation” by Martin Fowler is worth a read. I completely agree with his assertion that, from an architecture point of view, the editing and publishing of content should be [...]

 

After much deliberation on the subject, I decided to introduce breaking changes interface. I know, I know, I don’t do this lightly, in fact I think it’s the third worse thing I could possible do (sorry it does follow adding bugs and semantic changes). So here are my reasons why I thought this was necessary: [...]

 

I’ve recently seen some comments about various aspects of btree/b+tree structures that are troublesome. They are, IMHO, just plain wrong. Let’s look at a few of these and see if we can shed some light on b+trees and their implementations. 1. Items in a tree node must be presorted. FALSE This is simply not true, [...]

 

Sometimes it is necessary to generate a password. This might be done to create a secure account on a machine, or to reset a user’s password via email (although a one-time use security token is a much better answer). Another possible use is to generate passwords for your own use on a website. There are [...]

 

I’m sure you havn’t missed me too much, but I’ve been away on extended vacation in Dragon’s Reach. SkyRim was a blast, and the most fun I’ve had playing a game since the original Portal. Now… back to the real world :(

 

In this post we are going to explore some great new features introduced in the latest release of the protobuf-csharp-port project. We are going to build both an IIS service to handle requests as well as a sample client. Let’s get started. Prerequisites Let’s start by fetching a copy of the protobuf-csharp-port binaries. We can [...]

 

Keeping in line with our previous post “How to prevent users from killing your service or process” and continuing down the road of securing our service this post looks at the prevention of debugging. There are a lot of anti-debugging posts out there, most of them written in C++ and assembly and are therefor of [...]

 

Before I say another word, I have read “The arms race between programs and users” and wholeheartedly agree. You can not, and should not, attempt to stop an Administrator from killing your process or stopping your service. That is not what we are trying to do here, we are trying to prevent Joe User from [...]

 
Building a Windows Service - Part 7: Finishing touches

Continued from “Building a Windows Service – Part 6: Adding resources and event logging” So let’s recap our goals for this project: Building a service that can also be used from the console Proper event logging of service startup/shutdown and other activities Allowing multiple instances by using command-line arguments Self installation of service and event [...]