Microsoft has released its version of BitTorrent

Microsoft has developed and put on its website the Secure Content Downloader utility, designed for “secure” peering file sharing. Judging by the description of the program, it implements classic P2P technologies, which are known from BitTorrent and other similar programs. In particular, users can establish direct connections with each other and download parts of files directly from other personal computers, and not just from the server.

So far, the MSCD program has been released as a test version (Community Technology Preview), which only supports downloading a single Visual Studio 2008 Beta 2 distribution for four weeks. Naturally, the MSCD client works only under Windows.

If testing is successful, the company can probably use the technology to distribute other large distributions. This is good news for those programmers who download the same gigabyte files from MSDN five times, constantly getting the inscription “damaged archive”.

As is known, the peering technology allows you to distribute files that are in high demand without load on the central servers. Avalanche's P2P protocol, which is the basis of MSCD, is described in more detail in the scientific work here .