MonoTorrent 0.50 - The Good, The Bad, and the seriously awesome

It's release time! Yes, MonoTorrent 0.50 has hit. There have been a lot of changes since the last release, and this time, it's more than just under the hood fixes. There are several reasons why the new release is so much better than previous releases, I've listed the more important ones below, but first, the packages!

You can grab a precompiled binary suitable for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.
You can grab the sourcecode here as a .tar.gz archive.
There are also packages available on the OpenSuse build service, and of course the tag for the release can be gotten from svn.

Now, to the features and updates.

WebSeeding Support
There is provisional support for Http Web Seeding. This means when you're hosting a torrent, you can add standard Http servers as 'seeds'. No extra configuration is needed. This is still an experimental feature, and still has some corner cases where it doesn't work, all bug reports on this are welcome!

IP Address Banning
You can now ban individual IP addresses or IP Address ranges. Block lists from Emule, PeerGuardian and SafePeer are supported out of box by the built in parser, and any custom list can easily by loaded so long as you can parse the list into IPAddress objects. Internally the banlist is stored using the extremely efficient RangeCollection written by Aaron Bockover.

Efficent Torrent Streaming
Thanks to the efforts of Karthik Kailash and David Sanghera, we now have a special downloading mode in MonoTorrent which allows you to efficiently stream audio/video. Psuedo random piece picking is used to ensure you download pieces from a 'high priority' range before anything else. User code can set this 'High priority' range to be the next X bytes of data. When everything in the high priority range is downloaded, standard rarest-first picking is used.

Peer Exchange
uTorrent style Peer Exchange support is supported thanks to the tireless efforts of Olivier Dufour. This extension allows peer information to be passed across a bittorrent connection. In practice this means that if the tracker only gives you 1 peer, you can discover (potentially) hundreds more via peer exchange.

Enhanced compatibilty with broken clients
There are still clients out there which transmit corrupted BEncodedDictionary objects. These guys need to read the spec and ensure that their dictionaries keys are sorted using a binary comparison. In the cases where the order appears to not matter, I've implemented support for ignoring the error. This should reduce the number of clients which are disconnected due to sending corrupt messages - this means higher performance.

Simplified Threading API
The core of MonoTorrent has undergone a complete rewrite. Previously, all the worker threads interacted with the core by taking out locks, then doing their work. This meant that implementing something as trivial as cancelling a pending asynchronous request was actually pretty hard. That method was actually horrendously prone to deadlocking the engine.

Nowadays all the worker threads add a task to the main thread, and the main thread does all the work. "What about the performance" i hear you ask, well, it performs the exact same, but it's so much easier to maintain and add new features to.

It also means the engine should be deadlock free, because there are no locks anymore. Nice.

NUnit Tests
As with all big software projects, regressions are bad. A year ago I had virtually no NUnit tests. Nowadays there are over 130 NUnit tests for the engine. While this doesn't even test 1/2 the code in MonoTorrent, each test adds that little bit more certainty that I don't regress.

There are also a bunch bugfixes here and there, and more big features in the pipeline. As a taster, DHT support is already active and enabled in SVN should you wish to test it out.