This book will help you develop network applications with .NET, using either the C# or VB.NET programming language.
It covers everything you need to know about network programming in .NET, from basic get-started information, to a huge selection of advanced networking technologies that may have seemed like science fiction—until now. Whether you’re looking for a solution to a specific networking issue or for a general all-round knowledge of network application development, you’ll find it in this book!
This book is aimed at professional developers with some previous programming experience. Basic knowledge of either C# or VB.NET is an advantage, but not essential. This is not a beginners guide to .NET, and as such it is assumed that you already know basic programming constructs such as if statements and loops.
No previous experience with network programming is assumed, so even complete newcomers will find this book comprehensive enough cover all the basics. Seasoned programmers may skip the first chapter, and readers will quickly find the pace fast enough to keep even the most expert developers glued to the pages.
Although the book is geared for developers, as a solution architect, IT manager, or even computer science undergraduate, you will also find this book of enormous benefit. Every new concept is introduced with its associated technology theory and commercial implications for IT businesses. This book keeps a keen eye on best practice techniques, as well as provides ground-up implementations. Using this approach, project managers can help guide developers towards an implementation that could provide future flexibility or lead to faster end-product deployment.
In order to use the code examples provided in this book, you should install the latest version of the .NET framework from Microsoft’s Web site. It is also highly recommended that you install Visual Studio .NET, rather than use the command-line based compilers supplied with the .NET SDK.
The minimum hardware requirements for Visual Studio .NET are
Intel Pentium processor; 450 MHz or equivalent
Microsoft Windows 2000, NT 4.0, or XP
128 Mb RAM
3 Gb of available disk space
The telephony examples in chapter 14 require the use of a voice modem and access to a live analog phone line.
The book is divided into three main parts. The following sections will describe what is covered in each part of the book.
Chapters 1 to 6 cover the established Internet technologies. These include the main activities that we all carry out in our daily lives, everything from browsing the Web, sending e-mail, and maybe uploading files with FTP. Knowing how to implement these basic networking operations from .NET is a must for any serious developer. Ever wanted to link to your company Web site from your application or to send an e-mail whenever the program crashes? These chapters show you how.
Chapters 7 to 11 discuss network application design. These chapters are aimed at enterprise-scale development of heavy-duty distributed applications. Provided are five chapters on hardware, encryption, authentication, scalability, and performance. Encryption and authentication provide you with the confidence to know that nobody can defraud your system or compromise the confidentiality of the information held within it. Scalability ensures that you can keep your service working at full tilt even under extreme loads. With an excellent chapter on performance enhancing techniques, after reading this section you can be sure that no customer turns away because they were “bored waiting.” All together this handful of pages equates to a huge step forward in application quality.
Chapters 12 to 17 are geared toward the more specialized networking topics and the more advanced developer with a keen interest in niche or cutting-edge technologies. Each chapter in this section is the result of months of research, brought to you in simple step-by-step examples. This section includes possibly the first published implementation of frame-level packet capture in .NET, as well as a cool telephony application built from scratch in .NET.
These chapters also cover MSMQ, IPv6, WMI, DNS, Ping, WHOIS, Telnet, ARP, RIP, OSPF, BGP/EGP, SNMP, PPP, Web services, remoting, and more!
This book uses fixed-spaced font to differentiate between English text and keywords that are used verbatim in computer code. Words highlighted in italic are used to emphasize a new programming term.
You can find help for specific problems and questions by investigating several Web sites. A good place to start for issues relating to .NET is always Microsoft’s official Web site at msdn.Microsoft.com/net.
For definitive information on specific network protocols, you should consult the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) Web site at http://www.ietf.org/rfc.html.
You may also contact the author with any questions or comments regarding this book. While every care has been taken to ensure that all the information within is correct and accurate, you are free to report anything you feel is missing or erroneous, so that these can be corrected in future revisions.
Fiach Reid
Co. Donegal, Ireland
February 2004