Wander Alone Like A Rhinoceros Horn

In the last article of mine about SSL-related programming , the API to handle SSL transaction for the DICE was the SSPI (Security Support Provider Interface) that is one of the standard API sets provided by Microsoft Windows. Though I outlined why I chose SSPI over OpenSSL in the article, recently I replaced SSPI with OpenSSL in the latest version of the DICE that was released with HTTPS implemented. The rationale behind the switch of the SSL engine was not so straightforward. For me, the main concern about OpenSSL had been its putative close relationship with the BSD socket architecture that is not compatible with asynchronous sockets and I/O completion ports. Another concern was about OpenSSL's vulnerabilities against security breaches. OpenSSL has been an active target by crackers and one of the most scrutinized library. Not that Microsoft's implementation is any better, but as far as I know OpenSSL gets many security advisories about ...

Microsoft Windows 2000 and later have a very useful system function to make an asynchronous function call: QueueUserWorkItem . With this function and its thread pool that is aware of what Windows is actually doing at a given time, Windows takes care of all asynchronous function call complicatedness for you in the simplest form. This high-level function is a god-send for lazy programmers who would concentrate on what an application can do in a reasonable performance range rather than bothering about how it does things with the smallest performance hit. But people can never be lazy enough, setting it up with context information each time will soon become a boring task especially when you want to asynchronously call a member function of a C++ object. But it's not possible to make it completelly dynamic, either. You have to manually write a wrapper function, since QueueUserWorkItem is a mere C function that knows jack about C++. This article introduces a minimalisti...