Using the BITS Service

This episode explores the Background Intelligent Transfer Service (BITS), a built-in Windows service facilitating efficient uploads and downloads. The speaker, Pavel Yosifovich, introduces BITS as a COM-based API, explaining its role in managing connection retries and error handling. He then demonstrates using the BITS API in a C++ console application, creating a job, adding files, and managing the asynchronous download process. More significantly, the tutorial covers different approaches to monitoring download progress, including polling and implementing a callback interface for real-time notifications. For instance, the use of `SetNotifyFlags` is highlighted to control the types of notifications received. However, the demonstration encounters a snag related to apartment threading in COM, requiring adjustments to ensure proper callback functionality. Ultimately, the episode showcases how to leverage BITS for robust and secure file transfers, though it leaves some advanced debugging aspects for future exploration. This means developers can create applications that handle file transfers more efficiently and securely, leveraging the underlying Windows service.