Debugging of Windows Services in general is not an easy task. Due to their nature Windows Services require some tricks from a developer. One of the most hardest problem with Windows Services is the crashes in the production environment due to unhandled exceptions in the program, e.g. access violation, division by zero, etc. In such situations crash dumps are invaluable. Of course, you should always keep in mind to save the binaries and debug symbols for each build and do correct versioning. Some developers include exception handlers right into Windows Services, so the program itself can write a crash dump. Another option is to write an external watch-dog application (usually, another small Windows Service, which controls the execution of main Service and writes a mini dump in case of problems).
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If you ever programmed networking applications then you should know that it is impossible to control the timeout for blocking sockets on calling connect() function. This timeout is controlled by the operating system and may last up to 45 seconds when you want to connect to a non-existing host. Since blocking sockets are very attractive due to their simplicity in usage comparing to non-blocking (asynchronous) sockets, such a limitation disappoints many developers. You can change the value of timeout globally for the system, but I would like to warn you to avoid making any changes of the operating systems, as these changes will affect ALL networking applications running on your computer. In most cases, such a behavior is not desired.

In order to solve this problem you can use the following trick.
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This site is powered by WordPress – a great blogging engine. Indeed, it takes you five minutes to set it up and create your own site. WordPress has a flexible architecture. You can easily extend the functionality of your site by using thousands of plugins. While creating my site I needed some special features, so I spent some time to find and to select the best plugins. I think this can save you a lot of time too.

Here is a list of plugins I use.

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This article demonstrates the syntax higtlighting for different languages.

Please test it with your browser.

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