Customer Reviews

Peer-to-Peer with VB .NET

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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.]

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.