Supported Protocols

One of the most useful features offered by Win32 platforms is the capability to simultaneously support many different network protocols. As you read in Chapter 2, the Windows redirector ensures that network requests are routed to the right protocols and subsystems; however, with Winsock you can write network applications that directly utilize any one of these protocols. Chapter 6 discusses how machines on a network are addressed using the different protocols available to a workstation. One of the benefits of using the Winsock programming interface is that it is a protocol-independent interface. A majority of all operations are common no matter which protocol is used. However, you must understand how workstations are addressed in order to locate and connect to a peer for network communication.

Supported Win32 Network Protocols

Win32 platforms support a wide variety of protocols. Each protocol is usually capable of multiple behaviors. For example, Internet Protocol (IP) is capable of both connection-oriented stream services and connectionless datagram services. Table 5-1 provides most of the various protocols available and some of the behaviors each supports.

Table 5-1. The characteristics of available protocols

* NetBIOS supports datagrams sent to either unique or group NetBIOS clients. It does not support blanket broadcasts.

Windows CE Network Protocols

Windows CE differs from the other Win32 platforms in that it supports only TCP/IP as a network transport protocol. Additionally, Windows CE supports only the Winsock 1.1 specification, which means that most of the new Winsock 2 features covered in this section don't apply to this platform. Windows CE does support NetBIOS over TCP/IP through a redirector, but it does not offer any kind of programming interface to NetBIOS through the native NetBIOS API or through Winsock.