Technical details about
Instant Review for Visual Studio™

(Data) communication between the Instant Review Clients takes place via an overlay network (mesh) on the basis of a hybrid P2P system. Each team member is interpreted as an autonomous peer who can both request services and data of another peer and make services and data available to others. The difference to classical client server architectures is that there is no central server acting as a central communication and collaboration service. Communication only takes place directly between the participating peers.

The peers do not need to be located in the same local network in order to be able to communicate with each another. If a peer cannot get direct access (open port) to the communication partner, a connection request is made via a rendezvous service. The rendezvous service asks both peers to send messages to each other until direct communication between them becomes possible (hole punching).

Messages are exchanged directly and exclusively between the participating peers. No controlling third party is involved.

All (data) communication is encrypted (message encryption). For this purpose, special rotating encryption is used. For encryption purposes, information is used such as the passphrase allocated at the point of creation of the project team, which is only known to the participants in the project group. Joining a project group and thus taking part in the communication is only possible if the participant is in possession of both generated invitation file and passphrase.

A passphrase selected by the user at the point of creation of the project group (mesh) is used to generate the rotating key for message encryption. Messages can only be decrypted by peers who are in possession of the invitation file and passphrase.

Synchronization of the Instant Review Editor contents takes place at command level. This means that not only are the contents of the source-code file synchronized, but Visual Studio™ commands are also carried out at the recipient's end. This synchronization at command level enables all communication partners to execute commands (scrolling, highlighting, undo, redo, copy, paste) during the Instant Review Session and synchronize them with everyone else. The status in each case is synchronized along with the content.

The text chat are based completely on the communication and encryption infrastructure described above. All messages are encrypted and passed between the communication partners alone, the latter being the only ones capable of decrypting them.