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I have received several comments on my XPSP2 post regarding issues from our changes regarding raw sockets. I am very much not an expert on raw TCP sockets, but I certainly know people who are. If you are having a serious issue as a result of this change, please send me a note via the 'Contact' link on my blog page. Once I have your email and issue from there, I will be happy to put you in touch with people who are far more knowledgeable on the topic than I.
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Well, the blogsphere is pretty full of comments about XPSP2 at the moment. I would like to blog on it because I am very personally excited as all of the contents of the Advanced Networking Pack are in it, meaning that Grouping, Graphing and PNRP are all included. Thus, over the coming weeks, our technologies will be available on millions upon millions of machines. This is very exciting as it means that developers can now count on these technologies as being available on a large number of machines. The lack of wide deployment was one of the biggest impediments to adoption for our technologies, so I hope this will lead to a rise in apps using our technologies. On the sad side, I found a pretty ugly little oversite in XPSP2 the moment I installed it at home. Turns out that if you open the Security Center from Control Panel, there is a help link in the middle of the screen for "What's new in Windows to help protect my computer?" Pop that open and note the glaring 'XOX' placeholders in the help text. *Sigh* However, I would prefer to have issues like that than to have code issues. UPDATED: I have gotten a lot of responses that others are not seeing the XOX's in the help dialog. That is actually very good to hear, but I am doubly confused now. The install on my home machine was going straight from SP1 to SP2 downloaded from downloads.microsoft.com. I never had pre-release versions of SP2 on that box. I am now twice as curious about the issue, but at least the problem is not very common.
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Continuing on with updates about team structure, I thought I would share with everyone out there in the blogsphere that I am now the Program Manager in charge of the Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP). I am really excited to be in charge of PNRP because I think it is one of the coolest technologies that our team has delivered. Every time that I spoke to another product team in Microsoft or external developers, I would see all of these heads nodding along as I explained the utility of having a distributed name resolution system.
What does this mean to you guys out there? It means you now know who to talk to about PNRP. Have a question? Let me know. Want something changed? Tell me what. Doing something cool with PNRP and just want to tell someone, definately drop a note.
I will also try to post regularly about what we are doing with PNRP. There are always design questions for which I love to get feedback from the community.
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When I first started this blog, I explained how my team, the Peer Networking team, was responsible for the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer SDK. Well, a few months ago we changed our team name to Collaboration Technologies Team. That does not mean that anything has happened to P2P, but rather that we have a clearer focus. All of the technologies that you know and love such as PNRP, Grouping and Graphing are all still alive and kicking, and are still owned by our team. What has happened is that we took a deep look at the industry, a look at our technologies and a look at what end users wanted and saw that the common thread was collaboration.
Right now, collaboration is very difficult for developers to implement as connectivity between client machines is spotty, name resolution is non-existent, and multi-party messaging is difficult to pull off efficiently. This leads to a lot of software that relies on servers in the sky for rendevzous, traffic relaying and message multiplexing. Yet we can deliver the technologies needed to make the experience work without those servers. IPv6 (along with coexistence technologies like Teredo and 6to4) give us the addressability we need, PNRP gives us the name resolution needed, and grouping / graphing give us the needed multicast capabilities. We also have a lot more cool stuff coming that will make it easy for the average developer to enable collaboration in their applications.
I am pretty excited about our focus on collaboration as it means that we can better ensure that our technologies will effectively solve problems that developers face today.
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Given the low level of postings that I have had for some time, I expect that many of you have thought that I have died. I am sorry to disappoint, but the massive piles of work that were intended to kill me merely taught me the value of caffeine. I am back and you can expect more posts going forward.
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I will be presenting a session titled Innovating with Peer-to-Peer and IPv6 in the Networking track of the MVP Summit here in Redmond April 4th-7th. If you are coming to the summit, please see my talk or try to corner me around the conference. I will post some pictures soon so you can pick me out in a crowd.
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Disclaimer: This is a personal blog posting and is not written in my professional capacity. Well, the press seem to be having a field-day with the fact that we have announced that we are slipping release dates for some big software. Many people are asserting that we are intentionally moving dates so that we do not have to give the software to customers with Software Assurance contracts (customers who pay more and in exchange get free upgrades for a period of time). I have to throw in some comments on this from the inside of the company. Suggesting that MS is slipping dates as to intentionally avoid giving software to Software Assurance customers is nuts. From a purely numerical perspective, I’ll bet we make more selling the software to customers without SA agreements than we do on those agreements, so numerically it is better for us to release ASAP. The bigger issue is the constant insinuation that we set down at the beginning of each and every day and try to come up with a way to hurt our customers. Nothing could be further from the truth. Everyone I know here tries their best to do what they can for the customer. I know a lot of people who work all day and then answer newsgroup questions at night. I constantly hear of improvements that came from customer suggestions. I have sat through many meetings where we look at crash report logs and what is being done to fix the crashing software. For that example, the crash data is anonymous and from everywhere. It is not a major corporate customer threatening to leave if we don’t fix it, but rather us fixing things proactively because we know it is causing trouble for all our customers, particularly the people sitting at home without corporate help desks. When Microsoft slips a date, it is because we want to release the software customers want. We have hundreds of millions of customers who all use their software differently and we have to do the best job we can for everyone. We have to take the time to make sure that new features are what the customers need, that they work properly, that they are secure, that they are stable, and that they do not conflict with other features. I have seen people in multi-hour arguments over what feature will help customers the most. I have seen employees staying at work into the late hours of the night solving customer problems. I have seen people cry when something they thought was important had to be cut from a product to make a schedule. Many of us came to Microsoft because we knew that the work we did here would change the world. Sometimes what we do may seem strange or problematic, but it is usually because we are trying to do the best thing we can with our requirements and constraints, not because we are vicious. All that said, I do think we need to consider rethinking how we handle Software Assurance contracts. Those are some of our best customers who we should do right by. However, I have no doubt that the people who handle those contracts are considering those issues at this moment.
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Harry Pierson has a blog entry on the fact that one should not read slides but rather present from memory / dynamically. While I agree with Harry in general principal, I have to add a bit of an addition. Using PowerPoint slides has three major advantages over doing it raw, in my opinion. One is that you do not forget what you were going to say, but having the slides is sufficient for that, it does not mean that you have to read from them like a human text-to-speech engine. The second advantage, that is more unique, is that PowerPoint slides can be sent to the audience before or after the presentation so that they have them as a resource. Unfortunately, drawing on whiteboards does not have this capability. Finally, PowerPoint scales to large rooms better than whiteboards. Thus I suggest a slight twist on PowerPoint that I used when I was an evangelist (for those who do not know, Harry and I worked together as evangelists). I had slide decks that kept me on task but I also included blank slides with good notes in the notes section. I would then use my Tablet PC for the presentation and draw on the blank page as I would a whiteboard. It led to the same sort of dynamic feeling as using a whiteboard, but it scaled to larger rooms and led to persistent diagrams. I was able to save my Ink drawings and send the whole deck, including the Ink, to the audience. As far as I am concerned, Ink in PowerPoint is the second-biggest use of the Tablet PC (the first being unobtrusive use in meetings). If you have access to a Tablet PC and do presentations, I would strongly urge you to give this technique a shot sometime.
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Ray Ozzie (of Groove) has a blog posting about the new Homeland Security Information Network of which Groove will play an integral part. The Groove press release is here. I think this is a really exciting announcement as it demonstrates a very compelling legitimate use of P2P. Too often P2P is portrayed in the media as being purely about trading illegal MP3s, but hopefully uses like this will become more widely associated with the technology in the future.
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Sorry for the long delay without any updates. I was on vacation in Australia for several weeks and was thus not posting. I will not bore you with the details of my trip, but will instead share my main conclusion; Flightless birds rock. Look for several new posts in the next few days.
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Today I spent two hours in a meeting with The Man. I'm sure everyone reading this is in an organization with someone who qualifies as The Man, if not several qualifying people. Resultantly, you probably all know the nervousness that a meeting with The Man can bring.
During this particular meeting, numerous people had their phones ring in the middle of the meeting, neccessitating the embarrassed fumble-through-pockets-until-you-find-the-phone-then-figure-out-which-button-to-hit-to-shut-it-up routine that everyone has seen if not experienced. This experience is at its worst when you are in a meeting with The Man.
Towards the end of the meeting, I got a call myself. However, I had not remembered to put the phone in Silent mode. Fortunately, it still only buzzed and did not actually ring. Why? Because the Microsoft Smartphone rocks! It has the inteligence to look at my calendar and, if it sees that I am in a meeting, it automatically goes into silent mode.
It's simple things like that which make the Smartphone a great device. Add in that you always have meeting info no matter where you are, access to your email anytime in an easy manner, good games to pass the time while you wait for others at meetings, and some cool media functionality for WMA's, MP3's and even video, and you will find that the Smartphone is a great toy.
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For those of you attending the O’Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference this year (San Diego, Feb 8-12), Peer Networking will have a presence. Ravi Rao, another Program Manger from my team, will be attending the conference. If you are interested in Peer Networking be sure to chat with him.
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Welcome to Noah Horton’s Blog. On my blog, you will find info on Microsoft Windows Peer-to-Peer Networking, .NET Development, the digital lifestyle in general, and, occasionally, a rant on any particular topic that merits one. I am a Program Manager in the Peer Networking group of Microsoft. My team produces the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer SDK. I will post updates on the project and some tips and tricks in future weeks. I am personally very dedicated to the digital lifestyle and am a toy junkie. As a result, I will frequently post on the latest toys and how to get all the toys to work together. I hope you all enjoy my content. Please post any comments or questions that you like.
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