An advanced technology called network coding is hidden away in the labs at some vendors as they figure out what to do with it. But Microsoft already has a working network coding prototype. Its Microsoft Secure Content Distribution (MSCD) system was trialed recently by customers to download a new release of Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Beta-2.

Microsoft extended this trial into November, beyond its usual four weeks, to publicly test the capabilities and effectiveness of MCSD and evaluate its design and potential product plans for the future. It’s the first time Microsoft has distributed Visual Studio via peer-to-peer content distribution rather than server download.

“The Visual Studio team was pleased with the result; the feedback that we had from people [consumers and businesses] actually using it was largely positive, and it turned out to be fairly low effort to continue maintaining” the trial, says John Miller, a Microsoft software architect at the company’s research labs in Cambridge, England.

MSCD cannot traverse a company firewall, however, so IT departments needed to set up a proxy to bypass the firewall for peer-to-peer content exchange between applications internal and external to the business, he says.

Microsoft’s research into network coding began in early 2004, and a proof of concept for MSCD was developed later that year.

Network coding proved to be an easy technique to transition to from Microsoft’s investigation of heuristics for optimized content distribution.

“It worked right from the beginning,” says Microsoft Researcher Christos Gkantsidis. “The previous work was pointing to that direction, but before seeing the first papers on network coding, we didn’t know that this was the way to go. It was an interesting discovery.”

Microsoft still has not announced plans to develop and offer a commercial product that incorporates MSCD or a network coding mechanism. The company is crunching and examining the data from the MSCD trial before determining what to do next, Miller says.

Beyond peer-to-peer content distribution, Microsoft sees a role for network coding in distributing live streaming and video on demand, and peer-to-peer collaboration such as group and folder sharing, Gkantsidis says.