Lately there's been a lot of buzz about Orcas. You keep hearing about Silverlight and the Entity Framework and Jasper and Astoria and who knows how many other code names. One of the things that you don't hear about is PNRP. Why? I haven't the faintest idea because this is some of the coolest stuff to surface as a .NET API since .NET 1.0 reshaped our opinion of streams.
While experimenting with Orcas, I noticed that the PNRP (Peer Name Resolution Protocol) did in fact have a managed API. It is exposed through System.Net.PeerToPeer in the Beta 1 bits. PNRP is basically a service registry. Whenever you have a service that has become available that you want other clients on your network to know about, you register that information with PNRP. The great thing about PNRP is that you don't need a server like you do with DNS. You register the peer name with your local PNRP (Windows Service on XP SP 2 w/PNRP update or Vista RTM) service. If you are near other PNRP implementations, they will share information and propogate the service registration depending on the scope you've chosen for your service name.
