The first section of this book covers the legacy networking interface NetBIOS, the redirector, and the types of networking communications that operate over the redirector. While the majority of this book is dedicated to Winsock programming, we include Part I because these APIs offer some advantages over Winsock. Chapter 1 covers the NetBIOS interface, which—like Winsock—is a protocol-independent networking API. NetBIOS offers asynchronous calls as well as compatibility with older operating systems such as OS/2, DOS, and so on. Chapter 2 discusses the redirector, which is the basis for the next two topics, mailslots (Chapter 3) and named pipes (Chapter 4). The redirector provides transport-independent file I/O. Mailslots is a simple interface that among other things allows broadcasting and one-way data communication among Windows machines. Finally, named pipes provide a two-way communication channel that also supports Windows security.