Okay, I got shouted at by a friend this weekend for not blogging for so long, for which I can only say I'm sorry. I've had a hectic time recently with a lot of work. Not much of an excuse I know. I always wanted to keep the content-level of my blog pretty high, so I don't do a "look at all the links I found in other peoples blogs", nor do I blog about personal stuff. I try to keep the info new and useful. In this entry I'm going to break ALL of those "rules".
SSCLI
Thos of you who don't know what this is should get it right now. Basically, Microsoft released an implementation of the .NET Framework with source code. It can be fascinating to discover how various things are implemented. Anyway there's a new version out for .NET 2.0 which you can find here. I'd actually been going over the implementations of TcpChannel in Remoting just the last week.
I'd like to suggest that anyone with an interest in writing highly scalable, threaded solutions has a look at sscli\managedlibraries\remoting\channels\core\socketcache.cs and sscli\managedlibraries\remoting\channels\core\bytebufferpool.cs, to see the kind of tricks you can use to boost performance, including buffer pools, and ways of reducing or eliminating the need for expensive locks in threaded code.
Thanks to Scoble for the link.
Difference Add-In
I've been kicked in the a** to get cracking on new features for my Reflector.Diff tool, both by a user with some really cool ideas, and by the fact that I was asked to do a little write-up on it for a book. Anyway, I hadn't actually used it for a while (bad advert I know), and have realised many ways to make it far more useful. So, I'm starting the next rev now, which will be 0.8, since I'm going to be making some pretty fundamental changes.
So the point of this entry is that if you have any ideas on features you'd like to see, let me know ASAP, before I get too stuck in. Right now, since I'm looking at big changes, pretty much anything is up for grabs, whereas if you wait too long, I might have already settled the new architecture, and be unable to put in the requested features.
Family Issues
My younger brother Liam got married last weekend to a really fantastic woman called Charmelle. I'm grateful on so many levels. One is that the daily torture I subjected him to when we were younger appears not to have stopped him becoming the admirable person he is today. Two is that now the pressure is off me to continue the Hederman line. Three is that our family has acquired such a wonderful new addition.
About the only downside I can see is that if I ever do decide to settle down, Liam's sorta set the quality bar quite high.