The talk was titled "Integrating PNM into your P2P application". I got a lot of feedback from people that we should have titled the project differently (such as Discover and Interact with People located nearby), and people would have been more clear on what the goal of the talk was. Oh well...there's a next time I guess.

Having said that, I was really excited that we nearly filled up the ~200 person room! Wow! People seemed to laugh at my silly jokes, though one of my demos bombed. One of the Acer Ferrari laptops (what a cool laptop that is BTW) refused to project properly, and then when I tried the demo on the same machine, there were some other random problems which prevented it from working. I guess I hadn't made enough sacrifices to the demo gods :) Trust me though that I ran the demo after the talk and (of course) it ran just fine :)

I think the talk went well. People seemed to understand the space fairly well, although there was some confusion with other technologies from our team that did arise, namely PNRP and the mesh. I will have separate posts on those to clarify these areas, so that there is no confusion.

Here are some of the questions that I was asked (which I remember). If you have other questions you would like to see answered:

Q: Can you invite someone to an application that has not been launched
A: Yes! You send an invite, which contains a guid, and that will pop UI asking the user to authorize the launch of the requested application. If the user accepts, then the application gets launched

Q: What are the plans for standardization
A: We have not yet made formal plans on standardization/publishing protocols. Please watch this space, and I will update.

Q: What are plans with managed APIs
A: Sigh, currently, these are win32 APIs. We are hoping these are easy to use. If you are interested in creating a managed wrapper for these APIs, please drop me a line.

Q: Where are capabilities stored?
A: Capabilities are collaborative applications and are stored in a capability store in the registry. This registry location is opaque to the app developer, and should not be changed. If you have a need to change this location, please let us know.

Q: Can you turn off receiving invitations for certain applications?
A: Every application should expose UI that allows itself to be turned off from publishing in the people near me scope or to contacts. A user should use this application UI to turn off that application from getting discovered by anyone.

Q: How can I discover someone if they are not on the local subnet?
A: In the context of the local network, we just use multicast (WSD) for discovery. We don't technically do discovery over the Internet. Over the Internet, you need to know the name in advance, and then we will enable that name to be resolved to an IP address and port number. I will have a separate post on clarifying PNRP vs PNM so that there is no confusion.

Q: Are there group policy controls for this infrastructure?
A: Yes, there will be group policy controls.

Q: How do you prevent someone on the subnet from coming and attacking you?
A: On the same subnet, the user is going to need an *out of band" mechanism for knowing that a nickname published maps to a specific person he wants to interact with. We don't solve that problem yet...but for some scenarios that's probably ok...after all in hotspots, you probably are in punching range of the person :) Once you establish a connection with a person, that connection only lives as long as the invitation is sent and response received. After that the connection is torn down. Also, if you are getting lots of invites, and don't want to receive more, you probably will disable app invites in the UI, or will enable it till you invite a person into an activity, and then disable it. We are working on blocking invites from a specific person, but that may only happen post Windows vista. Please help us prioritize.

Q: Is PNM available on Windows CE?
A: Not yet. We are working on a plan, but I don't have anything concrete I can tell you yet.

Q: What is the versioniong policy for file overwrites with adhoc meetings?
A: Last write wins.

Q: If I want to interact with my brother who lives in Florida far away from me, do I have a way in which I can email our contacts to each other to enable this to happen?
A: Yes! You will be able to tak your Me contacts from the WAB (Windows Address Book) and just mail it to your brother. At that time, your brother will just open the received contact, and add it to the WAB.

There probably were other questions. Please let me know so I can answer these.

Once again, thanks for attending my talk today! I am looking forward to interacting with you all going forward.