Peer-to-Peer with VB .NET [Paperback]

Matthew MacDonald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 24, 2003

Peer-to-peer proponents claim that their technology holds the keys to building virtual supercomputers, sharing vast pools of knowledge, and creating self-sufficient communities on the Internet. Peer-to-Peer with VB .NET explores how these design ideas can be integrated into existing .NET applications. This book is an honest assessment of P2P and .NET. It doesn't just explain how to create P2P applications - it examines the tradeoffs that professional developers will encounter with .NET and P2P. It also considers several different approaches (Remoting, .NET networking, etc.) rather than adopting one fixed technology, and includes detailed examples of several popular P2P applications types (messenger, file sharer, and distributed task manager).

Editorial Reviews

Review

From the reviews:

"The value of this book is in explaining, or attempting to explain, the idea and how to implement it. … This book succeeds in outlining how to go about solving the problems using VB.NET and .NET in general. There are some useful examples and lots of descriptions … . If you want to be on the cutting edge of a new technology then this book provides a practical approach." (Mike James, Visual Systems Journal, April, 2004)

About the Author

Matthew MacDonald is an author, educator, and MCSD developer who has a passion for emerging technologies. He is a regular writer for developer journals such as Inside Visual Basic, ASPToday, and Hardcore Visual Studio .NET, a contributor to O’Reilly’s series of .NET Nutshell titles, and the author of several books about programming with .NET, including The Book of VB .NET (No Starch), .NET Distributed Applications (Microsoft Press), and User Interfaces in VB.NET (Apress). In a dimly remembered past life he studied English literature and theoretical physics.

Product Details

• Paperback: 440 pages
• Publisher: Apress; 1 edition (July 24, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1590591054
• ISBN-13: 978-1590591055
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 7.5 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,093,111 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Matthew MacDonald is an author, educator, and MCSD developer who has a passion for emerging technologies. He is a regular writer for developer journals such as Inside Visual Basic, ASPToday, and Hardcore Visual Studio .NET, and he's the author of several books about programming with .NET. In a dimly remembered past life, he studied English literature and theoretical physics. Send e-mail to him with praise, condemnation, and everything in between, to [e-mail].

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Build new p2p applications?, July 23, 2004

By 

W Boudville (Terra, Sol 3) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Peer-to-Peer with VB .NET (Paperback)

Say "peer-to-peer" to the average person and you might get a snide remark about downloading music and the RIAA. But MacDonald makes it very clear that p2p is far more than copyright infringement. He points out, for one thing, that the early design of the Internet itself posits a p2p network.

This book is well suited for those of you who might be interested in designing novel p2p applications on the dominant desktop environment. MacDonald gives a good summary of previous p2p applications, like Napster, Freenet and Gnutella. Important because if you are going to innovate, you need to know the prior art. He develops several simple p2p examples, like a file sharer and a messaging system. He shows how to use various VB.NET utilities to handle the networking, freeing you from coding low level details. More efficient use of your time. Of course, the hardest part of the problem is still left to you. Finding and designing a novel and compelling application. This book gives you the tools in VB to do that.

One important lesson from the book is that there are degrees of purity in p2p systems. Sometimes, it makes sense to do a pragmatic compromise and have some superpeers that function mostly as servers to the other peers. A p2p hardline developer might decry this, but if it works for you, go ahead. Hopefully, one effect of this book might be to help alter the perception that p2p = illicit.

[Sidenote: For a bloke who studied theoretical physics, his maths slips. He says IPv6 will support 1 trillion machines = 10^12. Actually, much, much more. 2^128 ~ 10^36.]

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars P2P - When you can connect :-(, July 10, 2005

By 

Kevin Crenshaw (Atlanta, GA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Peer-to-Peer with VB .NET (Paperback)

This book is a great starting point if you want to explore how to set up your own peer to peer network. It walks you through how to set up a file sharing program, an instant messenger, and a shared computing system. However, it leaves out what I believe to be one of the most important aspects of peer to peer programming - NAT traversal. The book deals with this subject in a very superficial way by telling you to seek out 3rd party solutions instead of showing you how to do it yourself - leaving you to figure out the details of this subject on your own. This would have been a 5 star book if this subject had been covered in greater detail.

I have found that NAT traversal is possible by implementing UDP hole punching techniques. However, I have not found any explanation for how to do it with .Net....yet.