6.6: Saying goodbye to compilers, operating systems and code...

2013-10-08

As we first mentioned here, release 6.6 of The Server Framework removes support for Visual Studio .Net (2002) and Visual Studio .Net (2003). The 2002 compiler is no longer supported by Microsoft and the 2003 compiler becomes unsupported in October this year. To be honest, I’m very pleased to see the back of them. Hopefully most users of the framework are using at least Visual Studio 2005, if you’re not, get in touch now.

We’re also dropping support for Windows 2000, which Microsoft stopped supporting in 2010 this means the Windows XP is the earliest supported operating system for version 6.6.

Finally we’re deprecating quite a bit of code. This will still be present in 6.6 but will, generally, be unavailable by default. You can add various defines to your Config.h to re-enable the deprecated code but be warned, it will be going in a future release.

The following code is deprecated in 6.6

CInOrderBufferList - use a CSortedBufferChain and a CBufferProcessor instead.
CSequentialBufferList - use a CSortedBufferChain and a CBufferProcessor instead.
The entire concept of “shared” locks, so CSharedCriticalSection, CSharedCriticalSectionFactory, CUniqueCriticalSectionFactory, ICriticalSectionFactory, ISharedCriticalSection, IManageSharedCriticalSections and CSmartSharedCriticalSection - the concept is no longer especially useful as the resource limitations and problems that existed with NT4 are now a thing of the distant past. However, since the code is still present in the framework people use it and end up with slower and more complex servers with contention between otherwise unrelated connections. Use the socket allocators that do NOT require lock factories as a replacement.
Likewise the entire concept of “shared lock sockets” which require the above shared locks to work, so socket allocators no longer take lock factories as constructor arguments and CSharedLockDatagramServerSocket, CSharedLockDatagramSocket, CSharedLockStreamSocket and CSharedLockSequencedStreamSocket are also no longer available - but that’s an implementation issue.
CCriticalSection and CCriticalSection2 - use one of the new locks, CLockableObject or CReentrantLockableObject instead.
CLowContentionBufferAllocator and CTLSBufferAllocator - use CBufferAllocator or CLockFreeBufferAllocator instead.
CDeflatingStreamSocketConnectionFilter and the “deflate-stream” WebSockets extension - note that “deflate-stream” was dropped from the final WebSocket standard and is not generally used.