A Socket Control/Component by Coalesys, Inc.

Here are some reasons why you should choose Coalesys Winsock Library for your network applications:

• Actually makes network programming easy. The primary goal of our Winsock Library is to make writing the network portion of your applications simple. Powerful network-aware applications can be created effortlessly, in a high-level development environment.


• Easy to learn object model. The object model should look familiar to developers. It consists of a main Winsock object, which contains a Sockets collection, which manages the individual Socket objects. Full documentation of these objects and their properties, methods and events are supplied in the accompanying help system.


• Ability to implement standard or custom protocols. With the Winsock Library, you can implement standard Internet protocols, such as FTP, SMTP or HTTP. Likewise, you can implement your own custom protocols, suited to your own personal needs. Synchronize data, check the availability of a network connection, monitor the health of a server or whatever you need to accomplish.


• Ability to create client and server applications. The creation of both client and server applications are supported. When operating in a client application, socket connections are initiated to the server. When operating in a server application, socket connections are accepted from the clients. Once a connection is established, all data is transferred through the sockets.


• Includes sample client and server applications. To help you get started, a sample client application and server application, written in Visual Basic 6.0, is included. These samples implement a custom protocol for supplying and gathering information about a server. You can read the source code to better understand how to use the Winsock Library, or you can use these samples as a starting point for your own applications.

Technology
The Coalesys Winsock Library is implemented as a single COM Automation DLL. It is positioned between your applications and Microsoft Windows Sockets. This layer does not attempt to bring the entire Winsock 2 API to your applications, but rather brings a collection of Automation objects. These objects are designed specifically to interact with the TCP/IP aspects of Windows Sockets. TCP/IP supplies your applications with reliable, error-free, connection-oriented data communication.

The Winsock Library is event-driven, firing events when a socket is connected or disconnected, or when a socket has data or space available. To perform well in single threaded applications, any method that could take some time to complete is executed asynchronously. The Winsock Library avoids buffering, by sending and receiving data directly between a socket and an application's buffer. It can transfer both string and binary data. String data does, however, get converted from Unicode to ANSI before being sent, and is converted from ANSI to Unicode after being received.

The Winsock Library is written entirely with Visual C++ 6.0. It supports the apartment-threading model, making it suitable for both single and multi-threaded applications. It is lightweight, carrying a very small footprint. It is dependency-free, not requiring any MFC or ATL DLLs. All objects implement dual interfaces, allowing you a choice on how to communicate with them (all necessary header files are included).