It has been a few months since my last posting, but I wanted to post some great news. PNRP is in Windows Vista Beta 1. It is there and it is beautiful. We have added some refinements to the message flows, tweaked some packets and made countless improvements in the code. We also have some awesome features in there like Extended Payload, which allows you to associate up to 4k of arbitrary data with a name that can be retrieved in the resolve (think of publishing the name 0.Halo2 with payload info of “14 players in map, 2 openings, player level is 7, map is ___, next game in 10 minutes, etc” and enumerating for the name. You could choose the best endpoint without ever connecting). We added a new resolve-only mode where the stack will go into a sort of silent mode where you can resolve for names without having one published yourself (nice to reduce idle bandwidth use). But perhaps the coolest new feature is GetAddrInfo integration. You read right – GetAddrInfo. If you pass what we call a PeerHostName (basically an encoded form of classifier.authority.pnrp.net) to GetAddrInfo, it will be resolved through PNRP instead of DNS. This means that existing apps can do PNRP resolves without any code change. Basically, think of starting up Terminal Server on your home box, register a name in the global cloud via something like netsh, and suddenly you can term serv into the box without DynDNS or any of that stuff. To convert some normal peer names into PeerHostNames, go into netsh in a cmd window, get into the “p2p pnrp peer” path and try out the convertname helper.
The other thing we did is we setup a service called PNRP Auto Registration (pnrpauto) that is automatically publishing a PNRP name. We did this so that the PNRP cloud would be as big as possible for testing purposes in the betas. We are going to disable this service before RC1, but then we are really excited to get a lot of good data and make sure that the protocol is as good as it can be. If, for some reason you really want to turn off the service, you can do so with the “net stop pnrpauto” command or through task manager.
There is some other really great stuff coming out in B2 that I am dying to talk to you all about, but I don’t want to jinx it yet (it is bad luck around here to mention something before it is in the main builds) but I think you will be VERY happy to see it.
