SocketTools Secure .NET Edition

Visual Studio .NET components for Internet application development
The SocketTools Secure .NET Edition is a kit of managed code classes that were developed to simplify the integration of Internet functionality into applications built using the Visual Studio development platform.

SocketTools is ideal for the Visual Basic or C# developer who requires the ease of use and rapid development features of a component, without the complexities of the native socket classes and without requiring in-depth knowledge of how the various Internet protocols are implemented.

With integrated support for secure, encrypted connections using the industry standard Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) and Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocols, the product includes nineteen class libraries and components which can be used to develop applications that meet a wide range of needs. All of the major protocols are supported, including secure versions of HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP3 and IMAP4. Secure sessions can be established just by setting a few properties and do not require any special knowledge of security protocols or encryption.

Main features of SocketTools Secure .NET Edition:

Managed code classes compatible with any .NET language

Class interfaces that are very similar to the SocketTools COM interfaces

Low resource utilization and no external dependencies on third-party libraries

A comprehensive product with support for all of the major Internet protocols

Fully compatible with Visual Studio 2003 and Visual Studio 2005

Includes both high level and lower level interfaces for maximum flexibility

Support for both synchronous and asynchronous network connections

Thread-safe implementation with full support for multithreaded applications

Support for FTP and HTTP proxy servers and automatic proxy detection

Support for the standard SSL and TLS security protocols with 128-bit encryption

Integrated security features can be enabled with just a few lines of code

Support for both implicit and explicit SSL and TLS connections

Support for client certificates when required by the remote host

No dependencies on third party security libraries

An extensive Developer's Guide and online Technical Reference

A professional technical support staff and extensive online support resources

No runtime licensing fees or additional royalties

A trusted company with over 10 years experience developing Internet components


Requirements of SocketTools Secure .NET Edition:

Intel Pentium processor (or compatible)

256 MB RAM

15 MB disk space


Limitations of SocketTools Secure .NET Edition:

30 days trial

What's New in This Release:

New Secure Shell (SSH) protocol .NET class, ActiveX control and library which supports secure interactive terminal sessions and remote command execution. For more information, refer to the documentation on the Secure Shell protocol.

Supports the SFTP (FTP+SSH) protocol integrated into the .NET class, ActiveX control and library. In most cases, the developer needs only to specify the SSH port number when establishing the connection. This makes it very easy to integrate SFTP into existing applications that use the FTP component.

New Internet Server .NET class and ActiveX control which enables developers to easily create multi-threaded, event-driven server applications. For more information, refer to the documentation for the InternetServer component. The SocketWrench API has also been extended to provide a collection server API functions as part of the library.

Updated for full compatibility with the Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista SP1 platforms, supporting the new security model and TCP/IP stack. It is recommended that applications which target these platforms upgrade to the current version.

Updated assemblies that specifically target Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET 3.5 Framework. Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET 2.0 Framework, as well as Visual Studio .NET 2003 and the .NET 1.1 Framework continue to be supported.

Added support for message storage to the MailMessage .NET class, ActiveX control and library. This enables the developer to easily store, retrieve and search multiple e-mail messages in a single data file.

Improved support for FTP servers that do not strictly conform to the protocol standard and increased overall compatibility with more servers, including many popular open-source FTP servers.

Added automatic file type detection for FTP transfers. The component will automatically set the correct file transfer mode based on the type of file being uploaded or downloaded. The developer can also register their own custom file types.

Added automatic file verification for FTP transfers. The component can automatically verify that the file on the local system is identical to the file on the server using an MD5 hash or CRC-32 checksum. The file verification process can also be performed directly by the application.

Added support for virtual hosting on FTP servers. This enables the component to be used on servers that are configured to support multiple domains using the same external IP address.

Added support for returning file quota information from an FTP server, if the server supports individual users quotas. This is used to determine the number of files the user may create, and the total amount of data that they may upload to the server.

The FTP .NET class, ActiveX control and library is now more tolerant of certain non-standard responses returned by mail server, rather than requiring result codes that exactly match the values specified in the protocol standard.

Improved support in the HTTP .NET class, ActiveX control and library for posting XML data to a server, including the ability to post XML data and retrieve the response from the server in a single function or method call.

Improved support for firewalls and proxy servers, and improved the auto-detection code used to automatically configure proxy settings.

Improved overall performance of file uploads and downloads using FTP and HTTP, increasing the overall throughput for applications that must transfer large files.

Improved the MIME parsing engine so that it will automatically attempt to correct problems with malformed messages, or messages which do not strictly conform to the RFC 822 and/or RFC 2045 standard message formats.

Improved the POP3 and IMAP4 ActiveX controls, libraries and .NET classes making them more efficient when processing very large mailboxes on the server.

Core networking code updated to use Windows Sockets 2.2 API and removed all previous dependencies on the Windows Sockets 1.1 and deprecated TCP/IP stack in unsupported versions of Windows. SocketTools is only supported on Windows 2000 and later platforms.

Redesigned the memory management code used to allocate buffers and private data structures for client sessions, improving performance and reducing overhead when multiple sessions are created in a multithreaded application.

Added support for multiple threading models on a per-session basis in the .NET classes, enabling applications to create "free threaded" client sessions that may be accessed by any thread at any time. The ThreadModel property was added to all networking classes to enable the application to specify the threading model which should be used.

Added support for AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) encryption for secure SSL/TLS connections on Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista.

Updated the Developers Guide and Technical Reference and made improvements and corrections to the overall documentation.

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