MonoTorrent 0.80 - Up up and away

MonoTorrent 0.80 has been released. I'd like to say "It's the best release ever", but that always makes me think "If it wasn't the best release ever, why would I release it?"

The full release notes can be read on www.monotorrent.com. For the lazy, I'll put a quick blurb about the two new most exciting new features available:

Metadata Exchange
http://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0009.html

Put simply, this means you can click on a link like this: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:12345678901234567890 and then the torrent will magically [0] be able to download. Behind the scenes what happens is that peers are found via DHT and then they are queried for the .torrent metadata. Once the metadata has been obtained, the actual downloading can commence and away you go. Finally, I can start a download via text message!

Local Peer Discovery

This allows MonoTorrent to find other peers who are downloading the same torrent on the local network. A simple UDP broadcast message is used for discovery. This is an implementation of style LDP and so is fully compatible with uTorrent and other clients which have implemented this style. The main benefit of this is that in corporate or educational environments, it's possible that many people will be trying to access the same torrent at the same time. This approach allows all these peers to connect to each other and thus transfer the bulk of their data over the internal LAN rather than all of them fighting for bandwidth on the (usually) limited WAN connection.

As per usual, there are a bunch of bug fixes and enhancements. This is one more milestone on the way to the final 1.0 release. One which I'm really looking forward to. I might even do some nostalgia posts about the big disasters I created while learning C# and implementing this library ;)

[0] Actual product does not contain magic.

EDIT: Just clarified that the LPD implementation is the uTorrent style.