Installing a P2P application.
Hi peer-to-peer guys.
Thanks for a great forum. I'm currently creating a "prove-of-concept" application using ms-p2p. Its purpose is to distribute a batch-process to idle PCs in a LAN using the p2p API. I think I've got the logic working (sending a task, processing the task and returning the result). My goal is to get it working in an office environment (LAN), first and foremost.
However, I'm concerned about the fact, that it seems difficult to get the p2p technology to work in different environments. The p2p seems very dependent on the hardware and software it operates upon. For instance the OS, NAT type, the firewall, transition technology like Teredo, are the services running, etc. Furthermore, I must check if all components are installed, at all. Also, as I read this forum, I fear I will run into a lot of troubles I haven't encountered yet. Many of the posts here are about technical difficulties related to the environment, and not so much about the API functionality.
My main concern is that if my application is to be bundled with a third-party application, then I cannot be sure that my part will work at all. I fear that I will have to do on-site support for almost every installation, and even then I might not be able to figure out why it doesn’t work!
I would like to hear your thoughts about all this.
...AND I know the question isn't very specific so plz don't answer with "can you tell us precisely what you problem is, because I don't have a specific problem yet".
Thanks
Henrik
Hi Henrik,
It's a good question.
The Peer to Peer suite of technologies have been in existence since XP SP2. We are working hard to make sure that the technology just works in all scenarios; we have extensive test beds that we test our framework on, and the technologies get tested extensively through betas as well. However, it is fully possible that there may be some corner cases where you encounter an issue that is not handled. For developers to have access to our product group members, we established this forum to make it easy to talk directly to us so that we can resolve the issues you are running into ASAP. In addition, as we learn about these issues (especially if they relate to reliability), we give these bugs high priority and investigate them immediately.
In addition, the nature of a technology forum (as opposed to an "API" forum) is that it will talk about issues that the technology is presenting, as opposed to issues in using the API itself. This forum is both, and it is great to see that developers are not finding that many problems in using our APIs. With respect to technologies, I fully expect that much like any software product, there will be issues once in a while that will crop up that have to be fixed. But that is not the common case.
We are here to help you succeed. The success of our product team is when we see developers like yourself shipping solutions that are adopted and loved by your customers. As you are seeing in this forum, as problems are being found, we are attempting as best as is possible (and as fast as possible) to ensure that it does not block you in any way. In addition, we are publishing debugging guides on our blog when you do run into corner case issues; we are creating SDK samples that show how to enable firewall exceptions for our services so that you can copy paste that code into your installer. Finally, if there are any other ideas you have of what would be interesting to have a sample for/write a blog entry on/anything else - we are all ears, please let us know.
Our own team has shipped experiences (one of which was considered a top 10 reason to upgrade to Vista in external reviews) in Windows whose usage is only going to keep interesting over time. And so far, neither the product team nor the product support team has had many interesting support issues to worry about.
I don't have a good sense of what the application you are building, but hopefully, I am answering your question...
Thanks,
Ravi
Hi Ravi.
Thank you for your answer.
I think my concern was caused mainly by my development setup. That is, I have 2 XPs and a Vista connected via a router with a symmetric NAT and I never got the P2P on the XPs to work (and believe me, I’ve triedJ). And then I of course applied that lesson to the “real world”: If my first attempt was this difficult, how about the next configuration and so on? However, I think the lesson here for me is to only use Vista. Everything seems to work perfectly on Vista, so I think I will simply make that a requirement. But thanks again for setting my mind at ease.
Henrik
