Catalyst Development

We’re pleased to announce the release of our SocketTools Toolbox collection of Internet development components. These new products offer you an efficient, cost-effective way to incorporate Internet functionality into your applications, no matter what kind of software development platform or which specific programming language you’re using.

One of the most common requests that we’ve heard from our developers is that they want to use SocketTools in their project, but they really only need support for a particular protocol. The SocketTools Toolbox components meet that need by providing libraries and components for the most commonly used application protocols in the SocketTools suite. They’re exactly the same components that are included in the SocketTools Editions, packaged individually at a reduced cost.

There are eight SocketTools Toolbox packages available:

SocketTools FTP Toolbox
SocketTools HTTP Toolbox
SocketTools IMAP Toolbox
SocketTools MIME Toolbox
SocketTools POP3 Toolbox
SocketTools SMTP Toolbox
SocketTools SSH Toolbox
SocketTools Telnet Toolbox

Each of these products are self-contained and include components which can be used with virtually any Windows programming language, along with examples and technical reference documentation. Each Toolbox package includes the following component types:

A managed .NET class for development with Visual Basic .NET and C#, or any other language which can target the .NET Framework. Assemblies are included for use with Visual Studio .NET 2003, Visual Studio 2005 and Visual Studio 2008. They are also supported with the current beta release of Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4.0.

An ATL-based ActiveX control for development with classic Visual Basic, Visual FoxPro, PowerBuilder and any other language which supports the use of ActiveX/COM components. The ActiveX controls can also be used as automation objects with scripting languages such as VBScript.

A Windows dynamic link library (DLL) that can be used with most programming languages. These libraries provide a standard SDK style interface that is very similar to the Windows API. Class wrappers, header files and import libraries are provided for Visual C++ and Borland C++, along with constants and function declarations for languages such as Visual Basic and PowerBASIC.

Each of the networking components supports secure connections, using the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), Transport Layer Security (TLS) and/or Secure Shell (SSH) protocols. For example, the SocketTools FTP Toolbox package can be used to establish a standard FTP connection, a secure connection using SSL/TLS (FTPS) or a secure connection using SSH (SFTP). Because you don’t need multiple components to support the different types of security protocols, your code is simplified and the amount of time you spend implementing file transfer functionality in your application can be significantly reduced. The different SocketTools Toolbox packages can also be combined, if your application needs support for more than one Internet protocol.

For more information, please visit our website at go.catalyst.com/toolbox where you can get an overview of each of the products, along with pricing and download links for a free 30-day evaluation.