14 DAY TRIAL // The first beta version of Network Monitor 3.2 is available for download via Microsoft Connect. Designed as a network protocol analyzer, the tool is set up to enable an insight into network traffic. With protocol capturing and analysis capabilities, Network Monitor 3.2 is the natural evolution of version 3.1 currently up for grabs via the Download Center. Paul ELong, from the Network Monitor Team revealed that the bits for version 3.2 Beta can be accessed through the Microsoft Network Monitor Project on Connect. The testing development milestone is not open to the general public as of yet.
At the end of 2007, Microsoft was promising that Beta 2 would drop no later than April. At that time, ELong indicated that the most obvious modifications would be on the surface, with a revamped user interface. Indeed the Network Monitor 3.2 Beta UI has been tweaked in order to streamline the user experience, increase visibility of certain features while burying others. In the end, the focus with the UI redesign was to enhance real estate space and discoverability, while bringing the tool's most powerful features to the foreground.
Network Monitor 3.2 brings to the table "new capture buffer to avoid dropping frames. After adding our drop frames counter, we found out under certain busy situations it would go above zero and we just couldn't have that. We now buffer the frames before parsing and displaying them. While this does add some complexities to capturing, it insures that packets are more reliably captured which is obviously very important," ELong revealed.
Via the Beta, Network Monitor 3.2 makes available to end users support for PCAP capture file and frame truncation. The tool has been tweaked to provide improved parser management, while the capture rate in high-speed networks has been boosted with changes to the capture engine. Users will be able to get a close view of all the processes on a Windows machine generating network traffic and focus on specific TCP streams and HTTP flows in conversations. Microsoft is also offering a Network Monitor application programing interface for developers that wish to build their own applications with network traffic capturing, parsing and analysis capabilities.
Network Monitor 3.2 Beta also delivers "more extensive documentation of the NPL which includes documentation on the new NMAPI. Access the documentation from Help > NPL and API Documentation. Enhanced filtering on items within NPL while loops or arrays. You can specify an index into the array or while loop to filter on. IA64 version now available. ContainsBin Plug-in: Search frames for arbitrary byte sequences or strings. For example, ContainsBin(FrameData, ASCII, "msn"). More UI indications of conversation status, dropped frames and the number of frames in the capture buffer," ELong added.