Summary

Programming directly to the network provides a great deal of power and flexibility. Of course, all of that power and flexibility comes at a cost. Many of the services provided by higher-level technologies, such as Web Services or remoting, aren’t available, and must often be re-created. However, in those situations where you must communicate with an existing application, or when you need the ultimate in control and speed, using the classes in System.Net makes life easier than it would be otherwise.

This chapter looked at many of the classes that expose network programming. You’ve seen how to make Web requests without a browser, so you can use the data on the Internet in your applications; you’ve seen how you can leverage the bare sockets layer to write your own communication protocols; and you’ve seen some of the new classes in Visual Basic 2005 for creating FTP clients and Web servers.