XPeer-to-peer

Following its acquisition of XDegrees, the peer-to-peer start up that is developing a storage application, Microsoft has today announced a new software development kit to make its XP operating system peer-to-peer friendly.

The beta version of the Windows XP Peer-to-Peer Software Development Kit was unveiled in the US yesterday and will be available in Australia soon. The kit will enable programmers to develop peer-to-peer applications for the XP operating system (OS). As part of the development kit, Microsoft has improved the data transportation protocol, Internet Protocol version 6. A full final release will be available later in the year.

At the release Microsoft also announced further peer-to-peer ambitions; it will release a peer-to-peer application programming interface (API) for XP.

Peer-to-peer could prove to be an important market place for Microsoft as the US software giant has such a hold on the desktop market. Peer-to-peer allows individual PCs to share data without using a centralised server.

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