SimpleNetworkFloating Sample

Before evaluating this sample, please read the topic on Understanding Network Floating Licensing.

Overview

As the name would suggest, this is a very simple Network Floating sample application, which shows how you may use the PLUSManaged library to interact with SOLO Server's NetworkFloatingService web service to create and maintain a Network Session within the limitations of the License in SOLO Server. The example allows you to perform the following:

Open a network session.
Perform a "Poll", or phone-home against SOLO Server to keep the session alive.
Check-out the network session to allow the application to run for an extended duration of time without polling/phoning home.
Check-in a network session to resume normal polling.
Close a network session.

SOLO Server allows you to manage a number of the network session attributes/properties, including:

How often the application polls/phones home (in seconds).
If a poll fails, how many times to retry, and how often to retry (in seconds)
The minimum and maximum amount of time which may be requested for a check-out period.
An optional grace period which you may use to allow temporary overages to help cope with short-lived connectivity outages.

Additionally, it is important to understand how SOLO Server calculates the date and time in which a network session (which is not checked-out) expires. Since you can configure the poll frequency, retry count, and retry frequency, SOLO Server calculates the Allocated Until Date (or the date-time in which the network session expires if it does not phone home before that time is reached) as follows: [Current Date-Time] + [Poll Frequency] + ([PollRetryCount] * [PollRetryFrequency]). So for example, if you had a Poll Frequency of 60 seconds (1 minute), a retry count of 6, and a retry frequency of 10 seconds, your Allocated Until Date would be set to 2 minutes in the future from the current date-time by SOLO Server. If the application fails to poll before this date-time has passed, then it is considered to be expired and no longer a consumed seat. However, if you specify an allowed overage period it will allow this seat to be brought back into use once again, but this could cause a negative value to be returned for the NetworkSession object's SeatsAvailable property (which indicates the overage when the value is negative).

Important

At the time this documentation was compiled, SOLO Server's NetworkFloatingService was still under development and testing. If this is a service you are interested in using, please contact us for additional details, documentation, status updates and a copy of the SimpleNetworkFloating sample application.