Longhorn Networking Chat: Http, Winsock and QoS

Today was the Longhorn Networking Chat, I've organized some of the QA and will do a series of posts on different topics that came up. See the full transcript on Channel 9.

Http, winsock and QoS are the areas closest to me organizationally so I'll start here.
There were a two http stack questions:

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Windows XP reduces simultanious connections to a HTTP (Web) server by default to 2-4. Will this be changed in Longhorn? (e.g. 5 simultanious connections allowed)

A: You are referring to the client connection limit, correct? We are conformant to the HTTP standard RFC which specifies the 2 connections/client/server limit. It is possible to change the limit programatically but the default will be standards conformant.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Is WinInet going to be depricated at somepoint for something more reliable?

A: We currently have WinHTTP, which is our preferred unmanaged client API. We are also investing in improving the stability of WinInet for browsing experiences.

A bunch of QoS questions:

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: What about QOS in the home or even DRM based access control for consumer scenarios?

A: We will have support for QoS in the home - some of this has already shipped in Media Center versions of the OS. This includes bandwidth measuring & monitoring, admission control, & QoS diagnostics.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Thansk Henry .. can you expand on QOS diagnostics ? is that more just self healing/event response kind of scenarios? (e.g. network slows down .. do action x ) or ..

A: More about telling you why your application doesn't work. For example, if you're trying to stream video off a server but the network bandwidth is chewed up for some other reason (a game, another video stream, etc) we'd like to be able to inform the user/application that they can't get the bandwidth they need, but if they shut down the activity on machine X they should be able to.

Of course, we're also investing in cooperative admission control protocols, so participating devices & machines will be able to avoid this problem.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Are we seeing more adoption of QOS tagging in consumer devices ?

A: This will be more important as consumer networking devices become more important. We think this is key thing going forward and we are working with the industry to try and accelerate this.

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: Will be there a possibility to easely configure bandwith limitations for applications, or if the pc is an ics host for computers?

A: Yes, programatically, or via group policies. Are you interested in a specific UI configuration for this?

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: If I am streaming audio or video over the net and downloading will the download interupt the streaming or will it be clever enough to reduce the speed of the download ?

A: We are looking at this...some of this is dependent on the applications. We certainly support the APIs and framework needed to do this in LH if applications use them. This is part of our QoS support.

... and a winsock question:

Henry_MSFT (Expert):
Q: In LH, will Layered Service Providers (LSP) be done away with?

A: No, they will still be supported. However, we are making efforts to clean up the architecture, make it more stable & secure, and make it easier to write solid LSPs.