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Kosar Jaff - The networked printer

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Description

Way back when PCs used to be a nightmarish mess of IRQs and IO Ports (remember that?), a few nutty guys in the industry went off and came up with the idea of making a plug-and-play bus. That turned into what is now known as USB. Kosar Jaff, who is now at Microsoft, was one of the developers of the original USB specification while he worked at Intel. Almost 10 years later, he's now back working on the next generation of cool connectivity technologies for devices -- wireless devices.

He runs a team called the Windows Connectivity Product Unit, fancy name for all things that have to do with plugging devices into the Windows PC. They're working on all kinds of wireless connectivity technologies, ranging from Bluetooth, to the upcoming Wireless USB technology.

About year ago, the team started looking at WiFi-based wireless devices. With WiFi radios going into almost every conceivable device type, this meant you could buy a printer, get it on your home or office network, and put the printer anywhere your network reaches, and voila, you have wireless printing! Well, not quite. There was a lot of pain in doing so and most users would probably not be able to figure out -- only serious networking gurus could manage. So, the team set off to make networked devices super easy, super secure, and, like with USB, a Plug-and-Play experience.

Kosar's team recently put together a demo of one of the first integrated Plug-and-Play wireless networked printers along with HP. This printer uses some really neat advanced Web Services protocols under the covers to solve some of the difficult problems around device discovery. The spec for WS-Discovery, the protocol that the printer uses, is up on MSDN under the Web Services area.

This demo shows the first step of finding and binding to the device. In Longhorn this will get a lot more seamless and will ultimately make it super easy to deploy networked devices in the home or in the office. The team is way past this now -- this video was shot back in April, so watch Channel 9 for more videos about the APIs and Protocols that will make it easy for developers to build & use networked devices.

Interested in more info on network connected devices? Send email to ncdinfo@microsoft.com or visit the URLs in the video, particularly: www.microsoft.com/winhec.

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The Discussion

  • User profile image
    will
    Cool, I just brought a new multifunction printer/scanner/copier/fax (HP PSC 2510) which has a network port, as well as offering WiFi connectivity.

    Must admit though, it was a bit of a pain to get the multifunction to "talk" with my router. (Had to install the HP software, and then find the hard-coded HP IP Address for the multifunction, then tell the HP software the multifunctions' IP address, before it allowed me to do anything else... After which, I could then tell it to grab the IP address the router... long process, could have been easier...).

    But this is cool anyway... Would have allowed me to be playing around with the device much sooner  Smiley
  • User profile image
    rasx
    This appears to be one of the first Channel9 videos with extensive post-production---featuring a soundtrack and lots of titles. It reeks of that kind of newbie-ness that a tool like MS MovieMaker should deodorize.

    This is a great chance for the Channel9 team to work with the MovieMaker team to make newbie-proof productions---fast. When all else fails, hang with the homies over at the .NET Show.
  • User profile image
    scobleizer
    Yup, I didn't do this one. Kosar sent it over and who's to argue with a guy who helped invent USB?
  • User profile image
    Nicholas

    Lol this is kind of weird, but FUNNY!!! Big Smile!      

  • User profile image
    RamblingGeek​UK

    Cool, but I would of liked to see it actual print....



  • User profile image
    lars
    Looks Channel9 just got interference from MTV...
  • User profile image
    kosar
    OK, guilty as charged.

    I love video production & music production (I used to be a professional radio announcer in college!) and I just couldn't resist drowing out the background noise with a small composition of mine. Smiley

    Seriously, we are quite a hard core group over here in the Devices Connectivity Group in Windows, but we try to have a lot of fun at the same time.  The music is really intended to poke some fun by putting some "theme music" behind the work we do.

    It helps us when the long hours start to wear us down.

    Smiley

    Anyway thx for the feedback.  I'll send more videos this way as we hit more milestones.  If you're interested in the SDK, and other info on the Networked Devices architecture, let us know either here on Ch9 or via the email address.

    Take care,
    Kosar
  • User profile image
    moofish
    wtf is all that graphics and music. I hope thats not the trend now, I liked it before when it was dead pan, *real* -- you know like when Ricky Gervais made that 'office' episode just for Microsoft.

    Samuel
  • User profile image
    Jaz
    it's weird but kinda funky i'll give you that.  Sometimes the white on red was kinda hard to read.


    Is there a way so that you can put URL's into the video but the uder can click them..?  probably not, but that'd be rather funky, interactive videos...
    hmm so when scobles talking to mr cool from VS.Net team it could flash up at the bottoma  link to his blog which you can click....

    or is this all a load of rubbish.
  • User profile image
    joelmartinez
    That's pretty bad * ... you know, people say that with Microsoft, "things just work".  How is Linux going to beat simply bringing the device into the room and it just works Wink

    good work people
  • User profile image
    kosar
    On the Video:
    - Thanks for the positive comments.  I will look at the ability to embed URLs in the video. I have not done that yet so I don't even know if it's possible.

    Thanks for the color comments -- I'll try another color scheme next time so it's easier to read.

    On the technology we're building:

    - Yup, the idea here is to make it super easy to use these new networked devices.  We're also adding APIs so it's easy to write applications to control them on the network, both local networks as well as over the web via Web Services protocols.

    - The printer in the demo actually uses the WS-Discovery protocol for discovery and name resolution. 

    Overall:
    - What We're doing is to make networked devices easy to make (ie., simple, cheap, reliable), easy to program (cool new APIs), and easy to use (Plug-and-Play).  Today it's just way too hard.  I get way too many phone calls from friends who are struggling with hooking up these new IP-based devices.  If we do our jobs right I should be able to spend more of my leisure time on my Barfoot (http://www.barfoot.com). Smiley

    By the way, we also work on Bluetooth in my team. One of these days I'll get one of the more, er, "colorful" developers on camera to talk about it.  Bluetooth is a really cool feature we added in Windows XPSP2.  The team that worked on it went "underground" for about 4 years on that project.  Pretty neat stuff came out.

    -Kosar


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