Catalyst Development

We’ve released an updated version of the SocketWrench Tutorial we originally made for the ActiveX control and Visual Basic. This new version uses the SocketWrench .NET component with Visual Studio 2005, and we believe that it is easier to read and understand, focusing on the developer who is new to Internet programming. The tutorial is divided into two general sections. The first section provides a broad overview of the concepts and terminology behind Internet programming. This includes topics on the network protocols, the domain name system, and the general design structure of a client-server application. We also include information about data encryption and certificate management using the standard SSL/TLS security protocols.

The second section of the tutorial walks you through creating your first Internet application, a web client that will download an HTML source page from a server. We decided to use this as the example because we felt it was simple and easy enough to understand without getting wrapped up in the details of building a more complex application. We’ve also included a companion video tutorial that demonstrates the same basic concepts.

Sometimes we’re asked why a developer should use SocketWrench rather than the classes or components which are already included with Visual Studio, or just using the Windows Sockets API directly. The tutorial answers that question by demonstrating how simple SocketWrench is to use. It’s a component that is useful for developers who are not experts in network programming, and yet it is flexible enough that it can be also be used with very complex applications.

The simplicity of SocketWrench is particularly evident when creating secure applications using SSL and TLS. Establishing a secure connection is a seamless process using the security functionality built into the SocketWrench. It automatically manages all of the complicated encryption and certificate validation, and doesn’t require you to understand any of the lower level implementation details. It also doesn’t require that you to use another class, like the SslStream class in .NET. As the tutorial demonstrates, switching between secure and standard (non-secure) connections only involves setting a single property to true or false.

Our goal with SocketWrench is to provide a component that makes it as easy as possible to Integrate Internet functionality in your own applications using code that is generally no more complex than opening, reading from and writing to a file. If you’re not familiar with Internet programming, we hope this tutorial helps minimize that initial learning curve and gets you started building your first Internet application.

» An Introduction to Internet Programming (PDF)
» SocketWrench Video Tutorial
» Download SocketWrench .NET for Visual Studio