Legal Stuff: The examples in this FAQ that aren't attributed to some other source are all hereby placed into the public domain. Use them, learn from them, enjoy them. But please understand that there is NO WARRANTY OF ANY KIND attached to these examples.

I test all of these examples with the command line compilers from Borland C++ 5.0 and Visual C++ 5.0. All of these examples can, in principle, be made to work with older compiler versions, but since I like to make use of newer C++ features, you may have to change some of the code to get the examples to compile.

Although the code is C++, it's mainly as a "C++-as-better-C" style. There is no object-oriented code here, yet.

The examples assume a compiler capable of generating Win32 console executables. This allows me to avoid all the GUI stuff: it just gets in the way when teaching Winsock. All of these examples currently use the Winsock 1.1 API, except a few that are marked, which require some Winsock 2 feature.

The header comment for each example shows how to compile that example.

The Examples

• Several Basic Winsock Programs
• Pinging a Host Using Microsoft's ICMP.DLL
• Pinging a Host Using Raw Sockets (Winsock 2)
• How to Pass a Socket Handle in Win32
• Getting the Local IP Address
• Getting the Network Interface List (Winsock 2)
• How to Get the MAC (a.k.a. "hardware") Address, NetBIOS method
• How to Get the MAC (a.k.a. "hardware") Address, SNMP method
• How to Get the MAC (a.k.a. "hardware") Address, RPC method
• Finding the Maximum Number of Open Sockets
• How to Get the Local User Name