Back in VB3 days I used Catalyst SocketWrench Freeware Edition to play with TCP/IP because we had no MS Winsock control (at least in VB3 Editions that I had access to).
Recently I wanted to play with UDP Broadcasts and deal with the problem of the one client per machine limitation ("address in use" errors).
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The Winsock control works great for a lot of things, but you can't set the SO_REUSEADDR option with it. This option must be set before calling .Bind(), but with the Winsock control the exposed socket handle isn't valid until after .Bind() is called.
I looked through a couple of the hacked up "Winsock control replacement in VB6" projects and sort of threw up. Not only don't they do what I need they are full of crusty coding and laughable errors. They might not be too buggy to work in simple test projects but typically their error reporting is horribly flawed.
I decided to dig around, and found that I still had SocketWrench 6.0 Freeware gathering dust in my Downloads Archive folder.
Installed that, and tried to retrofit a demo program using the Winsock control. Had a lot of small but tenacious problems because the documentation is lacking in this area but I did get it working.
I can now use UDP Broadcasts as a viable "push notification" mechanism on the LAN even with multiple programs on the same PC using it.
I didn't find very much here on using SocketWrench so perhaps it was never that popular after VB5 came out.
Does anyone else here still use it? I see a lot of whinging about the Winsock control (most of it coming down to misuse), but you can still find the SocketWrench 6.0 Freeware Edition to download if you do a few searches.
Recently I wanted to play with UDP Broadcasts and deal with the problem of the one client per machine limitation ("address in use" errors).
The Winsock control works great for a lot of things, but you can't set the SO_REUSEADDR option with it. This option must be set before calling .Bind(), but with the Winsock control the exposed socket handle isn't valid until after .Bind() is called.
I looked through a couple of the hacked up "Winsock control replacement in VB6" projects and sort of threw up. Not only don't they do what I need they are full of crusty coding and laughable errors. They might not be too buggy to work in simple test projects but typically their error reporting is horribly flawed.
I decided to dig around, and found that I still had SocketWrench 6.0 Freeware gathering dust in my Downloads Archive folder.
Installed that, and tried to retrofit a demo program using the Winsock control. Had a lot of small but tenacious problems because the documentation is lacking in this area but I did get it working.
I can now use UDP Broadcasts as a viable "push notification" mechanism on the LAN even with multiple programs on the same PC using it.
I didn't find very much here on using SocketWrench so perhaps it was never that popular after VB5 came out.
Does anyone else here still use it? I see a lot of whinging about the Winsock control (most of it coming down to misuse), but you can still find the SocketWrench 6.0 Freeware Edition to download if you do a few searches.