Peer to Peer (p2p) in Windows Vista - People Near Me API

Author: pigfoot

7 Sep

Peer to Peer (p2p) in Windows Vista - People Near Me API from ebooth’s blog.

The overview of the p2p APIs available in Windows Vista is:

PNRP (Peer Name Resolution Protocol) is like server-less DNS. It allows clients to register secured and unsecured peer names that can be resolved over the internet. Currently large data centers are required to host services that PNRP has the potential to replace. PNRP gives people the ability to discover a friend and see their presence online and then play a game or work on a project together.
PNM (People Near Me) allows for dynamic discovery and invitation of computers running Windows Vista on the same subnet or Ad-hoc wireless. This means you can play games with people in the airport, swap photos with your friends or collaborate with colleagues. For example Windows Meeting Space uses PNM.
Peer Naming API allows email providers to tie PNRP names to email addresses. Then any program that uses the WinSock APIs can resolve registered email addresses. This means you can literally ping a friend or put their email address where you would have to put an IP address in a game.
Graphing is a mesh networking API. It allows groups of people to share information and collaborate. A game could create a mesh of online players so that it could do server-less match making. Or an evangelism team could collaborate on a document without having to upload the latest copy to a server.
Grouping is the security component of Graphing. It allows for a group to be administrated, so that membership and permissions can be restricted. Think of Grouping and Graphing as a database in the cloud.
Peer Channel is the only managed API in the P2P API suite. It allows for mesh replication instead of mesh collaboration.
Application Invite (AppInvite) allows a user to invite another user to use a collaboration application. Any application can register with the invite API and when a user sends an invite to use that application the application will be launched by Windows Vista. Windows Meeting Space is an example of an application that uses AppInvite.
Contacts API allows the creation and administration of p2p contacts.
Serverless Presence: Gets contact presence information.