This week sees the 100th release of our SMS API. Some of these releases added major new features such as MMS, some didn’t make it past our test servers and others fixed bugs or made everything that little bit faster.
What’s in this release?
This milestone release doesn’t contain any major new features for you, our users, it’s all about making our lives easier at mediaburst and allowing for future changes.
We’ve changed to .NET 4
Microsoft released version 4 of their .NET framework a couple of months ago, along with it came Visual Studio 2010. Although there are no groundbreaking changes in this new Visual Studio it solves various day to day niggles.
Code rewriting
We’ve re-written some internal code that passes messages around between systems. It’s just housekeeping really, making use of the improvements between versions 2 and 4 of the .NET framework. The biggest change is the switch from ArrayLists of messages to strongly typed Lists using the new support of covariance and contravariance in generic types. This change allows the compiler to check what we’re adding to the list at compile time, rather than run time, hopefully avoiding any mistakes.
No more image messages
We’ve removed support for Nokia and EMS image messages. They’re small black and white bitmaps which look awful on modern phones, a much better choice, with wider handset support, is MMS. Processing these took large chunks of bespoke code, without them our sending scripts are so much easier to maintain as there’s only one set of logic.
Updated logging
And finally we’ve tweaked our sent message logging to make a number of internal reports run off a single database table. We currently have to link two databases on different servers if we want the same level of detail.