Conclusion

The Visual Basic Winsock control is useful for simple, noncritical applications that require network communication. A few problems with the Visual Basic 5.0 version of the control make successfully programming the control difficult, but most of the major problems have been corrected in the latest version of Visual Basic. The control offers the ability to add simple network communication to a Visual Basic application with relatively little effort. Of course, the control is limited in its overall abilities, and applications that require a great deal of interaction with Winsock should consider manually importing the necessary functions and constants from the Winsock DLL. As we mentioned earlier, we have provided Winsock Visual Basic examples throughout Part II that do in fact import Winsock functions from Ws2_32.dll. For examples, see the SimpleTCP and SimpleUDP applications under the Chapter07\VB directory and their Winsock.bas file.