The next release of The Server Framework, 6.4, includes code which allows a server to create a crash dump whilst it is running. Typically you might want to do this if some strange and possibly fatal exception gets thrown. Crash dumps are a great way to debug a server that is failing in production, the server generates the dump when something goes wrong and you can then load up the dump on your development machine and your debugger will be sitting on the line that caused the problem.
One of my clients has recently required .Net 4.0 hosting support and so most of the changes in the CLR Hosting Tools library in 6.3 have been driven by them.
The main new feature is the optional use of the .Net 4.0 hosting API. This allows us to host .Net 4.0 as well as earlier CLRs and also allows us to host multiple different CLRs in a single process. The new hosting API is supported via the CCLRHostFactory object which uses the CCLRMetaHost and CCLRRuntimes objects to present a consistent interface to both the .
The development of WASP has been acting as a bit of an internal driver for new feature development in the 6.3 release of The Server Framework. Sitting down to develop a service that was easy to use for a mass market exposed some small holes in the 6.2 release; nothing too serious but pretty soon after putting together the first service shell of the WASP application I had a list of nice to have additions for the Service Tools Library.
