Chapter 13. Networking

Microsoft Windows was designed with networking in mind, and it includes broad networking support that is integrated with the I/O system and the Windows API. The four basic types of networking software are services, APIs, protocols, and network adapter device drivers, and each is layered on the next to form a network stack. Windows has well-defined interfaces for each layer, so in addition to using the wide variety of APIs, protocols, and adapter device drivers that ship with Windows, third parties can extend the operating system's networking capabilities by developing their own.

In this chapter, we take you from the top of the Windows networking stack to the bottom. First, we present the mapping between the Windows networking software components and the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) reference model. Then we briefly describe the networking APIs available on Windows and explain how they are implemented. You'll learn how multiple redirector support and name resolution works and how protocol drivers are implemented. After looking at the implementation of network adapter device drivers, we examine binding, which is the glue that connects services, protocol stacks, and network adapters.