Windows Live ID Client SDK alpha release

jamesfinnigan — Fri, 02 Feb 2007 10:20:54 GMT

On a recent post about BITSAdmin, someone commented on how you needed to be logged into passport to download certain things. Well I noticed in Brian's blog that there is now an alpha release of the live client SDK. I haven't tried it out (still busy recruiting in Utah), but it looks promising that this will allow you to login via passport and then kick off bitsadmin to download those items.

Please provide feedback to help improve the SDK!

Thanks,
James

How to use BITS to transfer files

jamesfinnigan — Sat, 23 Dec 2006 13:57:55 GMT

BITS is Microsoft's background intelligent transfer service. It's used to transfer files without it bothering you (roughly). The goal is to use idle bandwidth, so it doesn't affect that streaming radio station that you like, your video chat, etc.

The service is relatively full-featured, although there isn't a proper UI that I'm aware of (not sure why this wasn't baked into IE7). I've usually whipped up a simple .net app to do this kind of thing (large files, bad connections), but it initially didn't handle proxies that well and was never great and didn't do the idle-bandwidth thing. Enter BITSAdmin.

BITSAdmin is a simple command-line tool shipping with Vista, and available as a download for XP and above.

Here's a sample of how to download XNA Game Studio Express 1.0:

BITSAdmin /transfer xnase http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/info.aspx?u=http%3a%2f%2fdownload.microsoft.com%2fdownload%2f9%2f0%2fb%2f90b2097b-cb79-40fd-9d00-0917afc039e1%2fxnagse_setup.msi xnase.msi

Here's another example of the same thing via tinyurl (it can help avoiding a lot of escaping of ampersands):

bitsadmin /transfer xnase http://tinyurl.com/yhmojh xnase.msi

This does it right away and lets you watch it. If you don't want that console window hanging around, or want to do several at once you can use this alternate syntax (bitsadmin /? shows the help but it's overly verbose and lacking decent simple examples before it launches into the 200 lines of help).

bitsadmin /CREATE /DOWNLOAD xnase

bitsadmin /ADDFILE xnase http://tinyurl.com/yhmojh xnase.msi

bitsadmin /ADDFILE xnase http://example.com/example.zip ex.zip

...

bitsadmin /RESUME xnase

bitsadmin /MONITOR (till it's done)

bitsadmin /COMPLETE xnase

You can adjust it's priority, set notifications, peer caching, etc, etc, etc.

James Finnigan : BITS

Windows Live ID Client SDK alpha release

How to use BITS to transfer files