NetBIOS

Chapter 17

NetBIOS

Network Basic Input/Output System (NetBIOS) is a standard application programming interface (API) developed for IBM in 1983 by Sytek Corporation. NetBIOS defines a programming interface for network communication but doesn't detail how the physical frames are transmitted over a network. In 1985, IBM created the NetBIOS Extended User Interface (NetBEUI), which was integrated with the NetBIOS interface to form an exact protocol. The NetBIOS interface became popular enough that vendors started implementing the NetBIOS programming interface on other protocols such as TCP/IP and IPX/SPX. Platforms and applications throughout the world rely on NetBIOS to this day, including many components of Microsoft Windows NT, Windows 2000, Windows 95, and Windows 98.

note

Microsoft Windows CE does not support the NetBIOS API, even though it supports TCP/IP as a transport protocol and NetBIOS names and name resolution.

The Windows NetBIOS interface offers backward compatibility with older applications. This chapter discusses the fundamentals of NetBIOS programming. First we cover the NetBIOS basics, beginning with a discussion of NetBIOS names and LANA numbers. We'll follow this with a discussion of basic services offered by NetBIOS, such as session-oriented and connectionless (datagram) communications. In each section, we present a simple client and server example. We'll wrap up this chapter with some common pitfalls and bugs that programmers often run into. Chapter 22 provides a command reference that summarizes each NetBIOS command with its required parameters and a short description of its behavior.



Network Programming for Microsoft Windows
Network Programming for Microsoft Windows (Microsoft Professional Series)
ISBN: 0735605602
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2001
Pages: 172
Authors: Anthony Jones

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