Recently, we were working on some network application that utilizes winsock with C or C++. Surprisingly, when doing the research, I found little useful information on winsock or socket programming with windows. If anybody has good resources, articles or links about winsock programming with C / C++ in general please share your knowledge.
For the beginners:
Winsock
In computing, Winsock (also Windows Sockets) is a specification that defines how Windows network software should access network services, especially TCP/IP.
Winsock intends to provide a single API to which both application developers and network software vendors should conform. For any particular version of Microsoft Windows, Winsock defines a binary interface (ABI) that guarantees an application conforming to the Winsock API will function in concert with any similarly conformant protocol implementation released by any network software vendor..
Winsock is based on BSD sockets, but provides additional functionality to allow the API to comply with the standard Windows programming model.
Implementations:
Windows Sockets has been supported by every version of Microsoft's operating system since Windows 3.0.
Version 1.1 of Winsock was supplied with Windows 95 and Windows NT.
Version 2 of Winsock was supplied with Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0, and all subsequent Windows operating systems. It provided functions that allowed a greater number of protocols to be supported.
Under Windows NT, Microsoft provides Windows Sockets support over TCP/IP and IPX/SPX, and DEC offers an implementation for DECNet. Windows NT includes mechanisms, both 32-bit and 16-bit, for multiple protocol support in Windows Sockets.
NetManage (NEWT), Distinct, Fawcette Technical Publications and Frontier have shipped Winsock TCP/IP stacks, as have Microsoft (Windows NT and TCP/IP for Windows for Workgroups), Beame & Whiteside Software (v1.1 compliant) and Sun PC-NFS. Windows 95 has dial-up networking, which supports Winsock over TCP/IP.
winsock.dll is available from some TCP/IP stack vendors. Novell has released an implementation for their Lan Workplace for DOS.
Trumpet Software has released a shareware Winsock compliant TCP/IP stack.
MSDN resource on WINSOCK:
[http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/en-us/winsock/winsock/winsock_reference.asp]
Download winsocks:
[ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/micro/pc-stuff/ms-windows/winsock/]
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