Going Further with ActiveX Document Servers

EX36A used a worker thread to read a text file from an Internet server. It used the MFC WinInet classes, and it assumed that a standard HTTP server was available. An ActiveX document server could just as easily make Winsock calls using the CBlockingSocket class from Chapter 34. That would imply that you were going beyond the HTTP and FTP protocols. You could, for example, write a custom internet server program that listened on port 81. (That server could run concurrently with IIS if necessary.) Your ActiveX document server could use a custom TCP/IP protocol to get binary data from an open socket. The server could use this data to update its window in real-time, or it could send the data to another device, such as a sound board.