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: [...]
Apr 102012
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, [...]
How to build a multi-protocol REST service with protocol buffers, xml, and json in 10 minutes or less using protobuf-csharp-port
Nov 222011
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 [...]
Nov 192011
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 [...]
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 [...]
Continued from “Building a Windows Service – Part 5: Adding command-line installation” So we have a working service it’s time to start adding some logging. Proper event logging is critical to monitoring services so we are not going to use .NET’s typical excuse for events. Rather we are going to build a ‘real’ message dll [...]
Continued from “Building a Windows Service – Part 4: Extending the Service Installer” So with our installer working it would be nice to have a way to just run the install right from the command-line. There are several options here, one way would be to use the Process object, set the start parameters to not [...]
Continued from “Building a Windows Service – Part 3: Creating a Service Installer” In the previous post we created a rough draft of our service installer. In this post we will focus on extending the capabilities of the default ServiceInstaller class and enhancing the behavior of the default class. Here are the goals: Use declarative [...]
Continued from “Building a Windows Service – Part 2: Adding a Service to a Console Application” We are going to take this in two steps, first the minimal we need to do to make something *sorta* work, then we are going to get fancy. This post will focus on the first part, making something work. [...]