Conclusion

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The NetBIOS interface is a powerful but outdated application interface.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 IPX/SPX. 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 learned in Part II of this book). Chapter 18 introduces the redirector, which is an integral part of mailslots and named pipes, which you'll learn about in Chapters 19 and 20.