I just got a phone call from my high-speed internet provider Comcast. It was an automated message, which I typically have little patience for. However, this message directed me to a page on their site that explains how to deal with MSBlast, including links to the patch and Symantec’s fix tool. Between this and their adoption of the MS TV software, I think it’s safe to say I’m very satisfied with their service.

I’ll be on vacation the next two days, but here’s a quick post before I go.

As I’m sure has been widely reported, WS-I Basic Profile 1.0 shipped today. But sheer lack-of-coincidence, MSFT shipped the latest P&P: Building Interoperable Web Services. No time to read it now, but I’ll check it out next week and report back.

I discovered a FAQ for the WinXP Advanced Networking Pack Among other FAQ’s (including “What is a F.A.Q.?”) are “What is a PNRP seed server?” and “How do I know if I can contact the Microsoft hosted PNRP seed server?”. A seed server is a bootstrap for a PNRP “cloud”. PNRP is supposed to be serverless, but there has to be some way for the system to be bootstrapped. MSFT runs a seed server at a well known address (well known to the P2P system, since no one told me). To see if you can reach said seed server, you can run “netsh p2p pnrp diag ping seed”. If the number is one or greater, all is good. In my case, that command raises Error 0x800706d9: “There are no more endpoints available from the endpoint mapper”. I’m not sure what that means, but I’m guessing that explains why I can’t resolve PNRP names.

Has anybody gotten the P2P SDK to work? I’ve been playing with it, working on ideas for wrapping it in managed code. I’ve actually got classes wrapping the Identity Manager and PNRP Namespace APIs as well as a start on the Graphing API. Due to the nature of the SDK, I’ve been writing in Managed C++. While tricky and not as much fun as writing C#, MC++ is pretty cool. Wrapping the P2P SDK with MC++ has been much easier than I expected. Except for one problem – I can’t seem to get PNRP to work. Even the GraphChat demo doesn’t work for me.

PNRP stands for the Peer Name Resolution Protocol. It is supposed to be a serverless DNS system. It allows me to register a peer name for later look up and resolution. I can register and unregister a peer name and endpoint. It even throws and exception if I attempt unregister without registering first, so something must be happening. But I can’t resolve the peer name to an address. And it’s not just my code (which is copied near verbatim from the help files), the sample GraphChat app doesn’t seem to work either. I’m attempting to register in the default “global” cloud as is the GraphChat sample, but no luck.

Just chatted Scoble on this – since he was so excited when we released it. As a fellow evangelist, he is willing to put me in touch with the powers-that-P2P. However, I’d appreciate hearing any other “war stories” out there.

A customer who reads my blog (and I think would rate me in the 7-9 range) sent me links to an article and book on Storytelling. The .NET & web services vision makes a great story. If you look at my old .NET Vision PPT, there is a real-world integration scenario. There are two slides – how it’s done today, and how it would be done with web services. I haven’t thought about it in terms of protagonists and antagonists, but the foundation is there.