Windows Core Networking

It’s been several weeks now since WinHEC, and we’ve been hard at work on RC1 work for the NetIO networking stack in Windows Vista and Windows Server Code-Name Longhorn. It was really great to meet with so many of the folks who’ve been partnering with Read More...

NDIS 6.0 was introduced to the independent hardware vendor (IHV) and developer community at last year’s WinHEC. It brings the promise of greater performance, improved manageability, reduced complexity for NDIS miniports, and simpler models for writing Read More...

As we worked on the Windows Vista Wireless Stack, extensibility was one of our key design goals. On previous releases, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from hardware and software developers on how they’d like to be able to extend the wireless experience. Read More...

We’re living in a highly connected world, where a large number of diverse devices gain access to the corporate environment using diverse technologies like wireless, wired 802.1x, virtual private networks (VPN), and more. Though this diversity is a great enabler allowing end users to always have up-to-date information at their fingertips, it creates a very challenging situation for enterprise IT administrators. Read More...

The Windows Vista TCP/IP stack has made tremendous improvements in its efficiency, taking full advantage of hardware advances (e.g. gigabit networking). As explained by Murari in a previous posting (Advances in Windows TCP/IP Networking), there are a number of bottlenecks that affect TCP throughput. Here, I will give some examples of how we’ve addressed these bottlenecks in the Windows Vista TCP/IP stack. Read More...

Winsock Kernel (WSK) is the latest network programming interface introduced by the WNDP team in Windows Vista. As evident by its name, WSK can be used by kernel-mode drivers for sending and receiving data over the network. But less evident to many developers, WSK is not an interface for performing network “filtering”. Hence, to clarify a common misconception up front, if all you want is to perform some form of network traffic filtering or interception, then you are strongly advised to look at the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) interface first. WFP is the one-stop shop for network filtering in Windows Vista. Read More...

What if you could filter IPsec encrypted traffic? What if you could easily filter both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic? What if you could write just a few lines of user-mode code to filter applications based on port, protocol and application ID? To do all this Read More...

The NetDMA term was coined by the networking team to imply a DMA (Direct Memory Access) engine that is used for moving networking data in memory. During WinHEC I will present the NetDMA architecture but for now I will give you the problem that NetDMA Read More...

In Windows Vista Home Premium and Ultimate editions, Media Center will be available to all. Xbox 360 has integrated Media Center Extender (MCX) functionality, and a lineup of additional MCX devices will be comming soon from a number of partners, making Read More...

There are several bottlenecks that prevent high performance transfers end-to-end: host system on the sender and receiver, the network and of course the applications themselves. For Windows networking stack to deliver high throughput in gigabit networks and beyond, we have to alleviate some or all of these bottlenecks. Read More...

The world is becoming increasingly interconnected. This is great because it enables us to access our information on more devices, in more locations and at all times. However, these benefits require new approaches to access control. They require us to go beyond securing the network perimeter to securing the internal network and the hosts themselves. That’s what NAP is all about – providing integrated access controls across multiple layers in the network and on the hosts. Read More...

Tell us about what you do in Windows. I’m NDIS development lead. I lead a team which works on NDIS and related components, and I also contribute to the architecture, coding and design of our components. How long have you been participating in WinHEC? Read More...

Starting Monday April 17th the WinHEC 2006 Guest Blogger Series begins right here on the WNDP blog The series is comprised of technical content from speakers and developers whose feature areas Microsoft will be highlighting during this year’s conference. Read More...