WebTransports's WebLog : WinHttp

Migrating

WebTransports — Wed, 20 Jul 2005 00:21:00 GMT

This blog is migrating to the WNDP blog. This one will stick around but won't be updated.

Longhorn Networking Chat: Http, Winsock and QoS

WebTransports — Tue, 22 Mar 2005 20:52:00 GMT

Today was the Longhorn Networking Chat, I've organized some of the QA and will do a series of posts on different topics that came up. See the full transcript on Channel 9.

Http, winsock and QoS are the areas closest to me organizationally so I'll start here.
There were a two http stack questions:

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Windows XP reduces simultanious connections to a HTTP (Web) server by default to 2-4. Will this be changed in Longhorn? (e.g. 5 simultanious connections allowed)

A: You are referring to the client connection limit, correct? We are conformant to the HTTP standard RFC which specifies the 2 connections/client/server limit. It is possible to change the limit programatically but the default will be standards conformant.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Is WinInet going to be depricated at somepoint for something more reliable?

A: We currently have WinHTTP, which is our preferred unmanaged client API. We are also investing in improving the stability of WinInet for browsing experiences.

A bunch of QoS questions:

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: What about QOS in the home or even DRM based access control for consumer scenarios?

A: We will have support for QoS in the home - some of this has already shipped in Media Center versions of the OS. This includes bandwidth measuring & monitoring, admission control, & QoS diagnostics.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Thansk Henry .. can you expand on QOS diagnostics ? is that more just self healing/event response kind of scenarios? (e.g. network slows down .. do action x ) or ..

A: More about telling you why your application doesn't work. For example, if you're trying to stream video off a server but the network bandwidth is chewed up for some other reason (a game, another video stream, etc) we'd like to be able to inform the user/application that they can't get the bandwidth they need, but if they shut down the activity on machine X they should be able to.

Of course, we're also investing in cooperative admission control protocols, so participating devices & machines will be able to avoid this problem.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Are we seeing more adoption of QOS tagging in consumer devices ?

A: This will be more important as consumer networking devices become more important. We think this is key thing going forward and we are working with the industry to try and accelerate this.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Will be there a possibility to easely configure bandwith limitations for applications, or if the pc is an ics host for computers?

A: Yes, programatically, or via group policies. Are you interested in a specific UI configuration for this?

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: If I am streaming audio or video over the net and downloading will the download interupt the streaming or will it be clever enough to reduce the speed of the download ?

A: We are looking at this...some of this is dependent on the applications. We certainly support the APIs and framework needed to do this in LH if applications use them. This is part of our QoS support.

... and a winsock question:

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: In LH, will Layered Service Providers (LSP) be done away with?

A: No, they will still be supported. However, we are making efforts to clean up the architecture, make it more stable & secure, and make it easier to write solid LSPs.

Welcome to Window's Web Transports Blog

WebTransports — Wed, 25 Feb 2004 01:01:00 GMT

This is a collaborative Weblog from the Web Transports Team in Windows Networking. As a team we work on the http stacks in Windows; http.sys the kernel part of the IIS 6.0 Web Server (part of Windows Server 2003) and its own developer API, wininet.dll which is the client side HTTP stack at the heart of Internet Explorer, and winhttp.dll which is the client side HTTP stack favored by server applications relying on performance and reliability.

At this point we aren’t sure exactly what sort of information we will put up here, but it probably will be related to whatever we get asked in the comments and whatever we are working on that week. Please don’t hesitate to post a comment with any questions or topics you wish us to talk about in the future. A lot of it will be developer focused, some content will be end user focused (especially on the wininet.dll/IE side).

If you don’t know what an HTTP stack is, it’s a protocol stack that talks the W3C’s HTTP protocol on behalf of applications. That’s the main protocol used on the web. It’s gone through a few versions, from 0.9 to 1.0 and now 1.1. We’ll probably write an entry or point to some good references on what has changed over time in the protocol’s evolution.

By the way, my name is Ari Pernick, and I’m a test development lead for web transports. As we post over time you will get an introduction to some of the Developers, Testers, Program Management, Product Support and others who contribute to our team.

UPDATE: In the comments below I claimed that pipelinning would be in Longhorn Version of Winhttp. It was early in the product cycle and since then, for a number of reasons, the code changes to support pipelinning support didn't make it into the final release. Sorry for any confusion.