Chapter 13. Networking

.NET provides many classes to help make network programming easier and more accessible than many environments that preceded it. There is a great deal of functionality to assist you in building "web-aware" applications; performing simple tasks like downloading files, sending and receiving HTTP requests, and writing TCP/IP clients and servers. In areas where Microsoft had not provided a direct managed way to access networking functionality (like named pipes), there is always P/Invoke to allow you to perform networking actions via the Win32 API, which we'll show you in this chapter. With all of the functionality at your disposal in the System.Networking namespace, you'll be writing web utilities in no time.