Jon Cole

Included in version 2.0 of the .NET framework is a Ping class (System.Net.NetworkInformation namespace) that can be used to monitor the up/down status of a network connection to a server. We recently realized that we had a minor bug in the class that...

A common misunderstanding for developers new to network programming over TCP sockets is how messages are sent and received. I frequently hear the statement that "my data is not arriving on the other side of the socket in the same format that I sent it...

I have been needing a set of classes to give me access to the settings for the Windows Firewall. I did a quick search and didn't find much that would help me in my quest to view or manipulate these settings, so I ended up writing my own managed wrapper...

I was recently asked about sample code for the System.Net.Security.SslStream using the asynchronous APIs. I searched the web and couldn't find anything significant, so I decided to write some that included the asynchronous usage of the TcpListenter and...

A fix for the SMSvcHost.exe Event ID 8 issue described here has now been published.  The download can be found at here: http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/Downloads/DownloadDetails.aspx?DownloadID=35626 . 

Recently, I have worked with several internal and external customers that are hitting an odd error when using WCF's TCP Port Sharing Service or Tcp Activation Service. The symptoms include client's timing out during channel open, an event log entry on...

How do the ServicePointManager.Expect100Continue and ServicePoint.Expect100Continue properties change the behavior of my HttpWebRequest? This is a question that seems to come up from time to time and I thought I would give a little more information. ...

As a follow up to my last post ( http://blogs.msdn.com/joncole/archive/2006/03/20/555721.aspx ) I decided to add some sample code for implementing an asynchronous version of ReadMessage. All of the same rules apply as discussed in my previous post, but...

I have periodically received questions on how to configure code using HttpWebRequest in an application that may be run in multiple types of environments (home user, corporate domain, with or with out a proxy, etc). This is what I would suggest. ...

When trying to help customers debug some issues it is periodically necessary to get a memory dump (snapshot) of a process for analysis at another time or place. This is frequently the case when an error is intermittent or a live debug session is not feasible...

While investigating a customer issue, I needed code to impersonate a different user on the current thread. A quick search of the msdn blogs turned up this post , which got me most of the way there. I decided to wrap the code into a class that inherits...

I recently helped a customer who ran into this error: System.ServiceModel.CommunicationException: The service endpoint failed to listen on the URI 'net.tcp://localhost/CalcultorService.svc/' because access was denied. Verify that the current user is...

An internal customer was asking how to control connection pooling on the server side of WCF for the Tcp Transport.  There are two knobs to control this behavior.  The first controls how long a connection can stay open while waiting to be reused...

Customers periodically ask for a way to enable TCP Keep Alive on the underlying socket for the TCP transport in WCF.  The most often reason I hear this request is to workaround an idle timeout on some intermediary device (like a proxy or load balancer...

MSDN recently published a series of new articles about WCF and WF.  Take a look and let me know what you think… Workflow Services Describes how to create and configure workflow services. Endpoints: Addresses, Bindings, and Contracts Describes how...

Authentication over HTTP is a way for a client to prove its identity to the server so that it can gain access to a resource. In this series I will discuss the various types of authentication to servers and to proxy servers. I assume you have a basic understanding...

I recently worked with a customer using BizTalk 2004. They were experiencing some very odd behavior where a WebService client would call into a BizTalk WebService and experience a long wait before the client finally got a timeout error. The timeout happend...