Catalyst Development

For hobbyist programmers who are interested in learning about Internet programming, we’ve released a free version of our popular SocketWrench ActiveX control. It has the standard features of our commercial product, but does not include support for secure connections or the Internet Server components. We’re offering this to developers as a way to both introduce our components, and help those who want to get started with an easy way to build Internet-enabled applications.

For professional developers who need security, additional functionality and technical support, we have commercial versions of SocketWrench. Secure connections using SSL/TLS can be easily established, usually with just an extra line of code, and for projects where you need to create a server application, the commercial version also includes the Internet Server component which makes it easy to create custom TCP/IP servers.

For those programmers who are primarily working with native code, such as classic Visual Basic, PowerBasic, C++ and other similar languages, our SocketWrench Secure Edition includes both an ActiveX control and a standard dynamic link library (DLL) that provides an interface that’s similar to the standard Windows API. It can be used with virtually any programming language, and has a great degree of flexibility.

For Visual Basic .NET and C# developers, we’ve designed SocketWrench .NET to really simplify Internet programming beyond what’s included as part of the .NET Framework. Microsoft has a lot of interdependency in their classes where you end up creating a number of different class instances and writing a lot of “glue code” to tie them together. An example of this would be the TcpClient class which uses the NetworkStream class, and then to convert the data read to a string, you’d need to use the System.Text.Encoding class and so on. If you need SSL support, then you’d also need the SslStream class, and write the code to integrate that. All of this functionality is incorporated directly into SocketWrench, which significantly reduces the amount of code that needs to be written. And as every developer knows, the less code you have to write, fewer errors will be in that code. A simple, straight-forward design is one of the cornerstones of reliable software. Give it a try and let us know what you think.