Avalanche is now live: Microsoft Secure Content Distribution (MSCD).

After three years of our initial research efforts with Avalanche, Microsoft is today making the resulting technology available as a public customer technology preview (CTP) under the name of Microsoft Secure Content Distribution (MSCD). See announcement at the Microsoft Research site for more details.

The MSCD technology is being used to distribute Visual Studio 2008 Beta-2. You can try it out and read more about MSCD by clicking here.

A major part in this success is due to the efforts that over these years Mitch Goldberg and John Miller’s incubation team (including my dear friend Armando Garcia Mendoza) have done at Microsoft Research Cambridge.

Apart from what or what not Microsoft will do with the technology in the future, the fact that anyone can now experience a secured P2P system using Network Coding is a great step forward for the research community. If you get to use it, please do not hesitate to leave your comments below.

John Miller is also running a blog where he is talking about MSCD and addressing some questions.