WASP plugins are, at present, native DLLs that expose a set of known entry points. The minimal plugin exposes a single entry point, either OnReadCompleted() or OnReadCompletedEx(). The entry points and other details that you need to build a plugin for WASP are detailed in the WASPDLLEntryPoint.h header file that ships in the SDK directory with WASP.
The simplest plugin that you could possibly write is one that uses OnReadCompletedEx() and which simply echoes all inbound data back to the client again.
As you will have noticed if you’ve been following along with the tutorials, WASP displays a message box when you successfully install an instance of the service or install the performance counters. This is less than ideal for automated installations and so you can add the /noMessages command line argument to these operations to give you an installation which does not require a user to acknowledge the message box.
If you need to automate the installation of one or more instances of WASP and/or the performance counters you can using /noMessages.
WASP can expose internal metrics using performance counters. These can then be viewed using the standard Windows performance monitoring tool, perfmon. WASP’s performance counters allow you to see how your server is performing and the counters can be automatically monitored and integrated with the counters from other Windows services, such as SQL server, the base operating system or the CLR, to provide a fully integrated production monitoring system.
Installation of performance counters is done once per machine rather than once per WASP instance and performance counters can be used and viewed both when WASP is running as a Windows Service and from the command line.
In the last tutorial I showed you how to run WASP as a normal command line executable. This can be useful for testing and development and also for debugging but when you want to run WASP on a production machine you probably want to run it as a Windows Service.
Running as a Windows Service has the advantage that you don’t need a user logged in to the machine to run WASP, you can also control it remotely using the Windows Service Control Manager application.
I’ve got quite a few plans for expanding the functionality that WASP provides. Ideally it should showcase all of the major options available with The Server Framework; so pretty soon I’ll be adding UDP support, hosting plugins written in managed code, providing secure TCP connections using SSL, etc. Plus I’m sure that some bugs will be shaken out as users push the system in ways that I haven’t anticipated and so haven’t tested.
The easiest way to get started with WASP is to download the latest version from the download page, here, unzip the contents somewhere and then run the WASP executable, simply double click the executable in Explorer or navigate to the directory that you have installed WASP into and type “wasp”. The result should be that a log file is created in a subdirectory of the directory where the exe is located called log.
