Microsoft has released the March CTP of .NET 3.5 (a.k.a Orcas) and there are many new networking features. Last year as I was doing the research for my book especially on the P2P implementation in WCF it was quite obvious that while that was an excellent start using PeerChannel, there was a lot left to me done (in managed code). This new CTP drop fixes that!
Over the last few months, I have been in touch with some of the guys on the P2P and the System.Net team and I have been very excited seeing what is coming out the door. In addition to improving socket perf. by 70% there is are new managed API’s now for PNRP, People Near Me, managing your mesh, etc. There is also support for URI’s with international characters. All this available in a new namespace – System.Net.PeerToPeer.
You can download the VPC with the SDK; unfortunately only the bits are not available at this point – the only way you can get this is via the VPC.
My only issue is I don’t like this new way from MS of distributing bits – why do I need to download so many gigs just to get a SDK or runtime? I usually have a dedicated playground where I can run most of the stuff natively and do not need the overhead of a VM.
Given VMWare is so much better, I wonder if this Is just one way to push VPC in the market? 
