======================================================================== DYNAMIC LINK LIBRARY : Provider Project Overview ======================================================================== Included is a sample library that uses the Windows Deployment Services Multicast Server library to implement a simple multicast provider. A multicast provider can be used with a custom multicast consumer to transport arbitrary user defined data over multicast. The sample consists of the following files - provider.vcxproj This is a Visual Studio file which contains information about the version of Visual Studio that generated the file, and information about the platforms, configurations, and project features. main.c This is the DLL's main source file. wdscp.rc This is a listing of all of the Microsoft Windows resources that the program uses. This file can be directly edited in Microsoft Visual Studio. wdscp.def This defines all the functions exported by the provider library. provider.sln This is the solution file for the provider sample generated using Visual Studio. This is the solution file which should be loaded into Visual Studio to generate the DLL for this sample. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Understanding the Multicast Solution ==================================== A content provider is just one part of a pair of components that must be implemented in order to transmit custom data over multicast. The other piece that is required is a content consumer that decodes the sequence of data blocks that it receives over multicast. It is the content provider's responsibility to encode the data the user is transmitting into a series of blocks that the content consumer can decode. The provided sample implements a simple provider that merely encodes a file on the server into a series of data blocks. ///////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// Implementing a Multicast Solution ================================= In order to implement a full end-to-end solution using the multicast provider sample you will need to: 1. Build the content provider DLL. 2. Install the content provider DLL on the WDS Transport Server and register it. This is a one-time process, after which the WDS Transport Server services need to be restarted. Registration can be accomplished by calling the IWdsTransportSetupManager::RegisterContentProvider method of the Windows Deployment Services Transport Management (WdsTptMgmt) API. 3. Create a WDS Transport "Namespace" on the server that defines this sample as the content provider and the folder containing the file(s) to be transferred over multicast. Again, this can be accomplished via the WdsTptMgmt API. 4. Use a consumer application to download files exposed by the above namespace. For example, the consumer application sample provided with the Windows Deployment Services Transport SDK can be used to accomplish this. /////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////