Noah Horton's WebBlog : P2P

PNRP Scope System

noahh — Mon, 16 Aug 2004 21:09:00 GMT

I have been wrestling with a question that I thought I would bring out to the rest of the world. In PNRP today, we have three scopes in which you can register or resolve a name; the global scope which includes all machines in the world, the site scope which mirrors the IPv6 concept of local site (usually within a company) and the link-local scope which represents all machines connected on a link. We have heard from a lot of developers that the link scope is very hard to use as every machine has a different link-cloud name (since the clouds are named after the interface) and because it is confusing regarding which one to use if there are multiple interfaces. Furthermore, IPv6 has deprecated their concept of site-scope, so it is unclear what should be done with that scope. Thus my question for the PNRP users out there is what scopes would be useful to you?

My current favorite idea is that site goes away (it never seemed to be used much anyways), individual link clouds remain for power users, but that we add a new keyword that can be used in place of a cloud name called something like 'ALL-LINK.' It would mean to perform the register or resolve in all of the link clouds. This would probably simplify life for 95% of use cases.

Does that sound helpful?

XPSP2

noahh — Wed, 11 Aug 2004 22:11:00 GMT

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.

PNRP Ownership

noahh — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 05:20:00 GMT

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.

Team Change

noahh — Sun, 01 Aug 2004 05:14:00 GMT

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.