After my rather lengthy post about all the cool stuff I was doing with MonoTorrent, i was asked this question:

I'm very curious about what are the real possibilities of MonoTorrent library. I mean, I always thought Bittorrent was just a protocol for P2P file exchange, but when I see so much modularity on MonoTorrent... The question is, how can MonoTorrent help me as a programmer?

Well, that's a pretty good question.

I'm going to talk briefly about the three important new features that are (or will soon) be available:

1) Custom Peer Connections
Aim: To allow the user to route all peer traffic over whatever medium they want.

Use case 1: You are writing an application which requires that all connections are encrypted end-to-end. This means you have complicated routines to set up the connections. You want to add the ability to transfer files.

Use case 2: You want to route bittorrent traffic over a network such as Tor.

Use case 3: Restrictive firewall. Suppose only certain kinds of traffic are allowed through a particular firewall you have. You can push the bittorrent traffic inside a different protocol to allow it to pass through the firewall.

In case 1 and 2, we assume that normally it is impossible for monotorrent to create the connections itself. So what you do is create the necessary connections manually, then wrap them in the IConnection interface and pass them directly into monotorrent. Everything else is automatic.

For case 3, it might be possible to implement a HttpPeerConnection, whereby you push the bittorrent messages inside of a HTTPWebRequest and then send that to the remote peer and he decodes it back into it's orginal form for processing. Note: I don't recommend you do this to avoid getting around a firewall in work. Also, if you do implement something like that, only other clients who implemented that feature would be able to communicate with you, but it is an interesting application.

2) Custom Trackers
Aim: To allow someone to add peer data into the engine manually.

Use case 1: You want to type in your friends ip:port so you can directly connect to him

Use case 2: In your application, you keep a list of people you can/should connect to, and you know that MonoTorrent can create connect to them directly.

Use case 3: You want to implement an alternative peer source like the bittorrent DHT protocol

In all these cases, you just have to implement two simple methods to allow MonoTorrent to get data from your source. For case 1, whenever you enter the ip:port combination, you just raise an event with that IP:Port stored in the event args.

Case 1 is a manual event, and so MonoTorrent would never query that 'Tracker' for peer details, but for case 2 and 3, it's more fun. All you do is wait for MonoTorrent to call the 'Announce' method on your tracker, then you go off and find the peers and raise the AnnounceComplete event when you're ready. It's as easy as pie.


3) Custom Messages

Use case 1: You're lazy and don't want to define your own messaging protocol or message format and want things to 'Just Work (tm)', so just piggy back all your messages over the MonoTorrent system.

Use case 2: You want/need to send a few pieces of information between torrent clients but don't want to have to set up a separate communication channel to do so in.

Use case 3: You want to make Bittorrent 2.0.

You need to implement a slightly more complex interface than the previous two examples, but it's nothing amazingly difficult. The helper methods for reading/writing the basic types from a byte[] are all there to make creating a message that much easier. So you're left with only having to implement a mere 4 abstract methods. Whilest this feature isn't finished as yet, it will be as simple as defining your custom message, then making a call like:

byte messageId = 9;
Message.Register(messageId, delegate { return new MyCustomMessage(); });

or

Message.register(messageId, delegate (TorrentManager m) {
return new MyCustomMessage(m.SomeData, m.OtherData);
});

Once that's done, you can queue up your message to be sent and react to it's arrival with ease. What you might want to send, i don't know. But the ability is there for you to send it.

So in brief, MonoTorrent can be used as a drop in replacement for either '1 to 1', '1 to many', 'many to 1' or even 'many to many' transfers. I'm not saying it *should* be used for all those cases, it may be the heavy weight alternative to a simple Socket.Send, but the possibility is there. You can send customised messages to the other clients so that they can perform custom logic and you can insert peer details easily from any source.