Chapter 11: Networking and Internetworking

Overview

The Microsoft .NET Framework includes a full set of classes for networking programming in two namespaces: System.Net and System.Net.Sockets . These classes support everything from socket-based programming with TCP/IP to downloading files and HTML pages from the Web over HTTP. The networking namespaces are also the foundation on which two higher-level networking platforms ”Remoting and XML Web services ”are built. This chapter won't tackle either of these platforms. Instead, they're covered in detail in Chapter 12.

This chapter presents recipes that show the following concepts:

• How to retrieve resources from the Web over HTTP (recipes 11.1, 11.2, and 11.3).

• How to display a Web page in a Microsoft Windows “based application using the Web Browser control (recipe 11.4).

• How to get IP address and DNS information about the current computer and other domains on the World Wide Web (recipes 11.5 and 11.6).

• How to send ping messages (recipe 11.7) and communicate using the TCP and UDP protocols (recipes 11.8 through 11.13).

• How to send and retrieve e-mail messages (recipes 11.14 and 11.15).