Introduction

.NET provides many classes to help make network programming easier than many environments that preceded it. There is a great deal of functionality to assist you with tasks like:

• Building network-aware applications

• Downloading files via FTP

• Sending and receiving HTTP requests

• Getting a higher degree of control using TCP/IP and sockets directly

In the areas in which Microsoft has not provided managed classes to access networking functionality (such as named pipes or some of the methods exposed by the WinInet API for Internet connection settings), there is always P/Invoke so you can code to the Win32 API; you'll explore this in this chapter. With all of the functionality at your disposal in the System.Net namespaces, you can write network utilities very quickly. Let's take a closer look at just a few of the things this section of .NET provides you access to.