Ravi Rao's Blog

The Peer Channel in Windows Communication Foundation (aka Indigo)

At this point, our only managed offering is the peer channel. The peer channel provides multiparty messaging in a mesh. It is an implementation of the graphing/grouping algorithms in Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), and allows you to use the familiar

How do I learn the GUID of the application to send an invite to

Applications can publish their availability to people near me. When you call PeerCollabRegisterCapability(), you can specify a scope which is the subnet and information about that application is now available to people near me. Now, each capability is

What does "Signing In" mean anyway?

Our infrastructure exposes APIs to signin...PeerCollabSignin(). There are two primary aspects of signing in: 1. Signing in to People Near Me (PNM): Signing into PNM means that you are publishing a nickname (which the user entered when our infrastructure

Terminology used in the peer to peer SDK

I'll keep this post updated with new names/terms as we put them in our SDK. Most of our terms had to be prefixed with the word "Peer" because the goal of the SDK (according to the SDK team) is to keep the documentation as *clear* as possible. Not sure

What is this collaboration host icon that shows up on my tray...

If you are developing to the peer to peer collaboration APIs you may see a tray icon appear when you first use the APIs. This is the collaboration host (the process name is p2phost.exe, and it is a user mode process). p2phost.exe is responsible for listening

Questions asked during the PDC talk on developing P2P applications

Q. Is there a concept of an owner/administrator of a mesh? A. Yes, you can have roles in a mesh. Q. Is there a way to kick someone out of a mesh? A: Currently, the only way to kick someone out of a mesh is to create another mesh without this member. Clearly,

Some useful links

Here are some useful links on P2P: http://www.microsoft.com/p2p (uber website, badly in need of updating) http://www.microsoft.com/technet/prodtechnol/winxppro/deploy/p2pintro.mspx (White paper) http://windowssdk.msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/P2PSDK/p2p/collaboration_api_reference.asp

My People Near Me talk at PDC

The talk was titled "Integrating PNM into your P2P application". I got a lot of feedback from people that we should have titled the project differently (such as Discover and Interact with People located nearby), and people would have been more clear on

Developing P2P Applications - the PDC talk

This talk was given by my manager Sandeep Singhal today. There were over 600 people at the talk! The talk was a broad overview of all the work our group is doing in the peer to peer collaboration space, and is a broader version (includes lots of details

Groove at the PDC

This post summarizes the Groove architecture below for the benefit of everyone. Groove builds an end to end system for collaborative workspaces. It works across firewalls, and with people being online/offline. The Groove Relay server is a store and forward

BillG keynote and Office 12 at the PDC

Office 12 is announced, and will go out at the same time as Windows Vista! The main goal is to make features more discoverable. I agree, that should be the main goal. Half the time, the feature I so wished Office should have already exists :) Some features

BillG keynote at PDC and Windows Vista

Wow! I work at Microsoft, and did not know how much cool stuff the company is working on as part of Windows Vista! Windows Vista has three broad themes: Clarity, Confidence and Connected. Clarity: Alt-tab has become so much richer, though I wonder how

The big electricity cut in LA during PDC

I finally landed up at PDC, and was greeted with a "you're not registered with our hotel, and have no place to stay" :) Luckily, the PDC registration team was more competent, gave me a confirmation number, using which the hotel staff was able to locate

More info on PDC talks and HOL labs

Codes: * Developing P2P applications - COM311 * Integrating People Near Me into existing applications - COM319 (9/15 10am) * People Near Me HOL (COM HOL33) * Peer Channel HOL (I don't have the HOL number handy for this right now) Look forward to meeting

PDC is upon us! How exciting!

PDC is coming, from 9/13 - 9/16. This is Microsoft's premier conference for developers, where developers can learn about what all Microsoft is doing to make Windows a more attractive developer platform. Peer to Peer will have a big presence at this event