Another maintenance release for WebSync Server was released today - version 3.5.0.7. This is a very small update that resolves an issue with the idle disconnect SQL query (only affects the sticky SQL provider). Head on over to the Downloads page to pick up the latest copy.

Happy coding!

Another maintenance release is out, bringing WebSync up to version 3.5.0.6. Head over to the Downloads page to pick up the latest copy.

Just a couple fixes in this one. IE should no longer throw a c00c023f error under any circumstances. We had previously applied a fix for the error occurring on page unload, but there was one additional case where it seemed to crop up. This one should be done for good now, but if you do happen to see it, please contact us with details about the conditions under which it occurs.

We also added a fix in the server-side initialization to account for cases where the location of web.config is non-standard, non-existent, or inaccessible for any reason. This should help with integration into third-party servers as well as when using SharePoint or other software that affects standard reading of configuration files. The symptom of the problem was a string of object reference errors in the logs when connecting clients. If you were affected by this, you should upgrade to this version as soon as possible.

That's all for now. Happy coding!

(And merry Christmas!)

Hey folks, we recently had an interesting discussion with some of the folks at Tech Werks about a recent implementation of WebSync On-Demand. The following is a summary from their founder, Bill Baker:

Tech Werks, a video streaming technology company, has been working with Frozen Mountain for several years, integrating Frozen Mountain's WebSync On-Demand services into their video encoders and live presentations. 

In addition to their work with various national and international television networks, Tech Werks supplies video streaming services and specialized on-line applications for the United States State Department. 

Recently, Tech Werks supplied these services for the APEC summits. The most recent Summit (November 2011) was held in Hawaii and involved many world leaders, including Presidents from the US (Barack Obama), China (Hu Jintao), Russia (Dmitry Medvedev), and Japan (Yoshihiko Noda).

During the primary Summit meetings, several world leaders had PowerPoint/KeyNote presentations.

The State Department asked Tech Werks to supply a system whereby each leader could use a simple tablet device (iPads in this case) to display and control their presentation, and send this presentation in real time to 25 other tablets for each leader to view. 

Needing a solution quickly, Tech Werks turned to Frozen Mountain's WebSync On-Demand comet solution as the real-time delivery service. 

Tech Werks integrated Frozen Mountain's WebSync On-Demand SDK into their pre-existing "app", and loaded the app on over 100 tablets, 25 of which were located on each seat in the primary plenary. 

During the summit meeting, each leader had a tablet and could advance forward and backwards through their presentation, and as they did so, all 25 tablets advanced forward and backwards in sync with the presenter.  

The app worked flawlessly, thanks to Frozen Mountain’s WebSync On-Demand Service.

Hot on the heels of the last release, we have a quick bug fix release to bring everyone up to date. There were a number of changes in the last release, and one of them had an unexpected side effect that could cause messages to be inserted into the database but never removed. In order for this bug to affect you, you would have to be running a standalone (outside IIS) application that invoked static RequestHandler methods, but did not have an httpHandler reference to RequestHandler in the app/web.config file. Not the most common scenario, but common enough to warrant a quick fix. Head on over to the Downloads page to pick up the latest version.

Happy coding!

We're happy to announce that the next release of WebSync is out in the wild! Head on over to the Downloads page to pick up the latest copy.

This is another patch release with a few bug fixes and some very nice enhancements. In particular, the Sticky SQL provider can now officially guarantee message delivery in every possible scenario, including complete server failures in a load-balanced environment! You may notice there is a slight increase in the CPU load during an application pool recycle, but our tests showed that even a dual-core server was still capable of handling 20,000 concurrent clients.

If you were seeing foreign key exceptions in your server logs, then rest easy. Our updated algorithms for client migration and application pool recycling have been vastly improved to reduce these to an absolute minimum. In most cases, they should be gone entirely.

The request handler has been updated to better handle improperly formatted messages, either from a sudden socket disconnection or some web crawler sending bad data. Bad data now receives a simple JSON response with no exceptions in the logs.

Several bugs were squashed with this release. First of all, onUnhandledReceive is now firing as expected in thick client applications. Apologies to anyone who spent time debugging this one - an improvement in another area of message receipt unexpectedly caused a problem with this callback. Next up is the rare IAsyncResult exception for long-running clients. This one proved almost impossible to track down, especially since it happens so rarely, but thanks to some great feedback from you, we believe we have gotten rid of this one for good as well. Finally, if you were seeing any sort of named pipe or IPC exceptions on the server-side, they should be gone with this release.

As always, we welcome every bit of feedback from you all. Please let us know if something isn't up to your standards. We pride ourselves in making simple what is complex, so if you find something counter-intuitive in the API, we will do our best to address it for the next major release.

Happy coding!

WebSync 3.5.0.3 was released today! Head over to the Downloads page to pick up the latest copy, and check out the Change Log for details on what was fixed/updated.

Issues with the Azure Table provider not starting up when deployed to the cloud have been resolved. A recent change by Microsoft in the handling of DateTime values in Azure Table Storage was at fault, but a workaround has been implemented in our code.

If the request handler or a provider fails to load for any reason, queries to request.ashx should now return a description of the error in JSON format. This is in addition to the server logging already made available through log4net, but it should make debugging server-side issues simpler.

There was a bug introduced in version 3.5.0.0 that would cause problems when sending Japanese and other Asian character sets over the network using HttpWebRequestTransfer. The problem was related to .NET's auto-detection of single-byte vs multi-byte character encodings and our own calculation of request content lengths. This issue is fixed with this release.

New build release for WebSync Server is now available with a few changes, notably some additional SQL enhancements and a couple of bug fixes related to HttpWebRequest timeouts and automatic mutex naming restrictions (DirectoryNotFoundException).

Happy coding!

Today I'm pleased to announce the release of WebSync 3.5, which adds full support for Java-based clients, which means we now have native support for Android and Blackberry!

Previously, WebSync was a real-time communications platform for .NET and the browser. With this release, we now have full native support for the full line of most popular smartphones and mobile devices - iPhones, iPads, Android phones, Android tablets, and Blackberry devices too!

We've done our best to keep the APIs between the various languages as consistent as possible, so the learning curve is absolutely minimal.

We've also added (as usual) a few little performance improvements, and in a couple places, better error handling.

So what are you waiting for? Go get the latest copy, or point your script to client.ashx?v=3.5.0!

Hey everyone!

Good news! We've just released WebSync 3.4.2! As always, you can check out the changelog, but the items of note are:

• better support for transferring of in-memory cache between overlapped worker processes, to avoid clients getting inadvertently idled out when the application pool resets and reduce the load on the database for SQL providers
• performance improvements for iOS and JavaScript JSON parsing
• support for changes to the system clock
• performance improvements to the SQL provider
• fix for the notorious IE "c00c023f" error
• fixed memory leak in the JSON parser

So, overall, pretty awesome release, if I do say so myself!

As always, you can grab a new copy of WebSync Server from our downloads page, and for the On-Demand customers, simply point your script to ?v=3.4.2!

We're looking for a new developer to join us in our Raleigh, NC office. Check out the job posting on StackOverflow.

If you're interested, drop us a line at jobs@frozenmountain.com!