Merry Christmas! Gibraltar 2.5.2 Shipped

With all of the crazy cold weather in the UK and the US we hid indoors and polished off the last details of Gibraltar 2.5.2 between cups of hot cocoa by the fire.  We previously talked about the key changes but while we’ve been holding the release we managed to get in some last improvements.

The biggest issues were two problems with the Hub server, one of which was rare but very problematic.  We wrote a new custom torture test library that simulated the effect of hundreds of web timeouts to identify some thorny issues caused by the thread abort exceptions thrown by IIS when it wants to time out a request.  Unfortunately requests can time out in a few cases, notably when really slow clients are uploading data, so every once in a while we were catching a magic problem that stopped the hub cold.  We also identified a problem with the new caching code introduced in 2.5.1 being just a bit too clever for its own good.  We gave it a stern talking to, had it fetch more wood from the farthest woodpile, and now all is right with the world.

Along with everything else in release we put some polish to the Gibraltar Agent for PostSharp (improvements in aspect ordering), two fixes to the Gemini issue tracking integration, and one API change to make it easier to submit sessions to the Hub whenever you want in code.  You can read up on all of it in the release notes.  If you’re running an older version of the Hub server, we seriously encourage you to upgrade to this release as soon as possible.  You can do this without changing anything else in your infrastructure as each component is backwards compatible with any version of the other components.

As always, keep your ideas coming - we’re hard at work on Gibraltar 3.0 along with VistaDB 4.2 and look forward to getting even more done in 2011 than we did in 2010.