Conclusion

The NetBIOS interface is a powerful but outdated application interface. One of its strengths is its protocol independence—applications can run over TCP/IP, NetBEUI, and SPX/IPX. NetBIOS offers both connection-oriented and connectionless communication. One major advantage the NetBIOS interface has over the Winsock interface is a unified name resolution and registration method. That is, a NetBIOS application only needs a NetBIOS name to operate, whereas a Winsock application that utilizes different protocols needs to be aware of each protocol's addressing scheme (as you'll learn in Part II). Chapter 2 will introduce the redirector. The redirector is an integral part of mailslots and named pipes, which you'll learn about in Chapters 3 and 4.