Windows Vista Public Beta 1 - Part 1

5. Technical Improvements - Windows Communication Foundation (Indigo)

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The Windows Communication Foundation (formerly code name "Indigo") Web service APIs make it easy to build and consume secure, reliable, and transacted Web services. New peer-to-peer capabilities enable the discovery and sharing of data between computers and nearby devices. Performance improvements have made communications faster than ever before and improved support for standards like IPv6, WS-*, and RSS makes Windows Visa a great way to write applications that communicate with each other.

Take advantage of exciting new ways to build applications with graphically-rich user experiences that really showcase your work.
Find out how easy it is to build secure applications by using features such as User Account Protection and code access security. Build applications with minimum privileges that reduce risk and allow users to maintain a secure Windows environment.
See how using a new set of APIs can make applications more predictable and manageable. Enhanced developer portal services help you understand how your Windows Vista applications behave in real-world deployments
Tap into the power of advanced Web services and peer-to-peer technologies to connect applications that support users working from the office, from home or on the road.

Extract and use data from documents better than ever before. A new XML-based file format and a shared RSS store allow your applications to access and provide the information users want to see.

Enable users to find information easier, by integrating documents and data generated by your applications into the search and organize experience.

Write installers that put application files in place without making other changes to a user's computer, and that ensure a consistent uninstall experience.

Use new capabilities to detect network and power state. Work with files from nearly anywhere, and take advantage of the power and technology of cool new mobile devices.

Windows Communication Foundation: The vast majority of applications that are developed today need to communicate with other applications. The ability to share data between a wide network of services that can communicate with other platforms and devices is what Web services are all about. Windows Communication Foundation is Microsoft's unified programming model for building Web service applications with managed code. It extends the .NET Framework to enable developers to build secure, reliable, and transacted Web services that interoperate across platforms and integrate with existing investments. Windows Communication Foundation is built from the ground-up to combine and extend the capabilities of existing Microsoft distributed systems technologies, including Enterprise Services, System.Messaging, .NET Remoting, ASMX, and WSE to deliver a unified development experience.

The Windows Communication Foundation takes Web services to the next level. Support for the WS-* protocols means that Web services can easily take advantage of interoperable security, reliability, and transaction support required by businesses today. Developers can now focus on business logic and leave the underlying plumbing to Windows Communication Foundation. Windows Communication Foundation also provides opportunities for new messaging scenarios with support for additional transports like TCP and named pipes and new channels like the Peer Channel. More flexibility is also available around hosting Web services. Windows Forms applications, ASP.NET applications, console applications, Windows services, and COM+ services can all easily host Web service endpoints on any protocol, which includes full HTTP.SYS support. The Windows Communication Foundation also has many options for digitally signing and encrypting messages, including the following token support: Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), Kerberos, X.509, and Username.

The Windows Communication Foundation Web service platform provides flexibility and extensibility. For developers who want to access underlying messages directly or who want strong control over Web service contracts, the ability to explicitly define messages and how they are exchanged gives developers the easy manageability they need. Indigo also provides extensibility hooks so that developers can write custom channels and extensions that plug directly into the Communication Foundation pipeline.

Peer-to-Peer : Windows Vista provides capabilities for discovering and communicating between applications without the need for centralized servers. The peer-to-peer capabilities of Windows Vista give users and applications the ability to discover and interact with others on the network in a secure fashion.

Central to the capabilities of the peer-to-peer support in Windows Vista is the Peer Name Resolution Protocol (PNRP), which enables dynamic name publication and resolution. Today, names are assigned to computers in a relatively static fashion along with their IP addresses. PNRP provides a much more dynamic ability to register multiple names on a computer, to have multiple computers register a single name, and to even have applications register names. Name records can contain additional metadata describing the associated resource. All of this is done in a secure fashion that prevents spoofing. Developers can use standard name resolution APIs, like getaddrinfo, to resolve their PNRP names.

Peer-to-peer networking enables multiparty interaction by creating meshes of nodes that self-organize into a robust communication group; messages can be sent to all mesh nodes through one or more hops. New nodes can be dynamically added and removed from the mesh without losing the overall connectivity. Secure meshes can be created with restricted membership. Meshes enable the publication of shared data records that are automatically replicated and persisted among all members. Everyone in the group sees updates to the data immediately, as if it were performed locally.

The Windows Communication Foundation Web service API provides a multiparty messaging channel (called the Peer Channel) that developers can use to create large, scalable meshes for sending and receiving Web service messages.

The peer-to-peer capabilities of Windows Vista also provide the ability for applications to find "People Near Me." This enables developers to create applications that enumerate individuals who are physically near them on the network so that data can be easily shared. Using peer-to-peer APIs, individuals can be invited to participate in activities, such as voice chat or games.

Quality of Service : Quality of Service (QoS) technologies manage the transmission of particular types of data-for instance streaming media-to ensure that data is transmitted at the right time with the right speed. Previous releases of the Windows operating system provide support for the industry standard Generic Quality of Service (gQOS), using Diffserv and Intserv and RSVP signaling. Windows Vista extends QoS functionality by adding network awareness and greater user-friendliness through the quality Windows Audio Video Experience (qWAVE) package (available through the .NET Framework) and a new implementation of the Network Location Awareness Service (NLA2).

Both the qWAVE and NLA2 technologies are designed to be aware of network changes and capabilities to provide adaptive QoS support. Run-time feedback allows applications to dynamically adjust to network bandwidth changes by transcoding (changing between digital video formats) or transrating (adjusting to network speeds by changing the video resolution). In addition, multimedia applications can use Windows Vista Quality of Service technology to proactively query network configurations and identify legacy devices that can drop packets or crash.

Windows Vista network applications can make use of qWAVE distributed administration control to provide consistent management of network resources through priorities.

The Windows Vista Quality of Service tools are designed to inform and empower end users by providing instant and meaningful feedback. For example, an end user typically has no indication that something like heavy network load may be causing a degradation of performance or a connection drop. Under Windows Vista, the system would quickly notify the user of the degradation and its cause, enabling the user to take action.