SocketWrench Freeware Edition Changelog

What's new in SocketWrench Freeware Edition 6.0

• There have been a significant number of internal changes to the control in this release of SocketWrench. We've made improvements to overall performance, and made some structural changes to the code to eliminate compatibility issues with Windows Vista. Along with these changes, it's important to note that SocketTools 6.0 is only compatible with Windows 2000 and later versions. The core networking code was rewritten to use the latest version of the Windows Sockets API and some Microsoft extensions that aren't available in earlier versions of the operating system.
• One of the significant changes in SocketWrench 6.0 is support for the new Windows Vista platform. Vista contains a lot of changes to the base operating system, enhanced security and a completely new TCP/IP stack. Some of those “under the hood” changes include changes specifically to support Vista, as well as some new features. For example, AES encryption is supported on Vista for secure connections using SSL and TLS. However, it’s important to note that you won’t have a problem deploying your applications to earlier versions of Windows. You don’t need write any platform-specific code to use our controls; we handle all of the differences internally, whether you’re running on Windows 2000, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003 or Windows Vista.
• Another one of the key architectural changes in this version is a new threading model for the libraries which makes it much easier to build multithreaded applications. This new functionality can be enabled with a single option when establishing the connection. With free threading, handle and object ownership is no longer restricted to the thread that created it, and you have complete control over how threads are used to manage the network session.
• For anyone who upgraded from earlier versions of SocketWrench to version 4.0, one of the big changes was that the version 4.0 interfaces were not source compatible. It was something that we felt was important to do in order to lay the foundation for future versions of SocketWrench, but it did make the upgrade process more difficult. Fortunately, you’ll find that upgrading to version 6.0 will be seamless and requires no changes to your existing code. You’re free to change your code to take advantage of the new features, but all you’ll need to do is reference the new controls. However, it’s important to keep in mind that the new version is not binary compatible with previous versions. In other words, they aren’t drop-in replacements for the same controls, so it does mean that you’ll need to recompile your application. The good news there is that it also means that the 5.0 controls can co-exist with any previous versions of SocketWrench without a problem.
• If you're upgrading from an earlier version of SocketWrench, aside from many of the internal changes made to the components, we've also added new functionality. For developers using the SocketWrench control, we've also added some new methods that make reading and writing large streams of data as simple as a single method call. Review the ReadStream and WriteStream methods. If your application is exchanging data with the remote host as lines of text, then you'll also want to take a look at the new ReadLine and WriteLine methods. By popular request, we've added a new Peek method that will enable you to read data from the socket without removing it from the socket buffers. There's also been some minor interface changes which won't affect code compatibility. For example, the ReadEx and WriteEx methods have been deprecated, with the standard Read and Write methods taking on their functionality. A new Bind method has also been added to make it easier to implement UDP based servers.