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Winsock intends to provide a single API to which both application developers and network software vendors should conform. For any particular version of Microsoft Windows, Winsock defines a binary interface ( ABI) that guarantees an application conforming to the Winsock API will function in concert with any similarly conformant protocol implementation released by any network software vendor..

Winsock is based on BSD sockets, but provides additional functionality to allow the API to comply with the standard Windows programming model.

Winsock was conceived at the Interop in October 1991 during a " Birds of a Feather" session.

1 Implementations

Windows Sockets has been supported by every version of Microsoft's operating system since Windows 3.0.

• Version 1.1 of Winsock was supplied with Windows 95Windows 95 ( codename Chicago is a hybrid 16-bit/ 32-bit graphical operating system released on October 13, 1995 by the Microsoft Corporation. Windows 95 is a direct descendant of Microsoft's formerly separate MS-DOS and Windows products. It is the first and Windows NTMicrosoft Windows NT is an operating system produced by Microsoft Corporation. It is the ancestor of their current flagship Windows XP. Development When development started in 1988, Windows NT was to be known as OS/2 3. 0, the third version of the operati.

• Version 2 of Winsock was supplied with Windows 98Windows 98 ( codename Memphis is a graphical operating system released on June 25, 1998 by the Microsoft Corporation. The new operating system was essentially an updated version of Windows 95, and like that earlier version, it was a hybrid 16-bit/ 32-bit, Windows NT 4.0, and all subsequent Windows operating systems. It provided functions that allowed a greater number of supported protocols, asynchronous notification of network events, multicastingMulticast is the delivery of information to multiple destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once and only create copies when the links to the destinations split. By comparis and quality of serviceIn the fields of telecommunications and computer networking, the traffic engineering term Quality of Service QoS can mean two related but distinct things. In circuit-switched networks it refers to the probability of being able to initiate a call to anothe functionality.

Under Winsock version 2, Microsoft provided support in the specification support for TCP/IP, IPX/SPXIPX/SPX which stands for Internet Packet Exchange/Sequenced Packet Exchange is a networking protocol used by the Novell NetWare operating systems. Like UDP/IP, IPX is a datagram protocol used for connectionless communications. SPX is a transport layer pro and DECDigital Equipment Corporation is a pioneering company in the American computer industry. They are generally referred to within the computing industry as DEC . This acronym was once officially used by DEC itself Digital Equipment Corporation#References|[1]'s DECNet (DEC offer an implementation of the aforementioned protocol). Winsock 2 includes mechanisms, both 32-bit and 16-bit, for multiple protocol support in Windows Sockets.

NetManage (NEWT), Distinct, Fawcette Technical Publications and Frontier have shipped Winsock TCP/IP stacks, as have Microsoft (Windows NT and TCP/IP for Windows for Workgroups), Beame & Whiteside Software (v1.1 compliant) and Sun PC-NFS. Windows 95 has dial-up networking, which supports Winsock over TCP/IP.

winsock.dll is available from some TCP/IP stack vendors. Novell, Inc. has released an implementation for their Lan Workplace for DOS.

Trumpet Software has released a shareware Winsock compliant TCP/IP stack.