Conclusion

The Winsock 2 SPI offers software developers a method of extending the capabilities of Winsock 2 by developing a service provider. In this chapter, we explained the details of how to develop a transport provider and a name space provider. This chapter concludes our discussion of the Winsock networking technology. The next chapter deals with the Microsoft Visual Basic Winsock control. The control does use Winsock, but we won't introduce any new Winsock concepts. We simply provide a manual for how to use the Winsock control from Visual Basic. If you're not concerned with Visual Basic, you can move to the third and final section of this book, which covers Remote Access Service (RAS)—a technology that can add even greater flexibility to Winsock applications.