Windows socket services.

An implementation of BSD sockets for Microsoft Windows. Implemented in the form of a DLL named winsock.dll.

Stuck at a Windows box reading Microsoft's developer documentation for Winsock, I laughed quite a bit at the following sentence:

"Winsock is based on the BSD socket API."

Yeah, right, I wish. See bastardization.

What I don't like about Winsock:

• You must initialize it with WSAStartup() bullcrap, which must supply a library version number
• You cannot access them through ordinary file I/O calls. Before I didn't RTFM and assumed you could, after all, this is the BSD socket API, is it not? Wrong!
• Instead of a sane int as a descriptor, it's a SOCKET typedef, which is an unsigned int pointer!
• Functions don't return a single consistant value on error like they should. On UNIX it's -1. Windows? It varies. This is because sockets are pointers, rather than file descriptors as they should be.

I'd say what they did, was take some BSD code, and say, "How can we force our incoherent coding style down this?"

The Winsock API has been updated and is now called Winsock 2. Among the new features include Quality Of Service support, Overlapped I/O, Protocol Independence and Multicast. It is available for Windows 95, 98, NT and up. A 3rd-party commercial library is available in the form of a COM / ActiveX component to simplify programming this powerful networking API.