If you have programmed in the UNIX environment, you will definitely find these functions familiar. Since this is merely an introductory article on the world of sockets, I am not going into any lengthy war stories about any of these functions. Please feel free to utilize your online help in order to accommodate their usage. Typing your Sockets Because Windows programming is message based, it is asynchronous. That means that things don't necessarily happen in order.
Packets arrive all the times, and in different order.
Typical sockets programming, however, are synchronous. If your program asks the socket to send some information, it will wait for a reply. Because the multi-tasking nature of windows cannot wait for the synchronous response of a typical socket, There must be a method to apply the synchronous behaviour of sockets to the asynchronous world of windows. As you can tell, most of these functions are renamed versions of the common UNIX socket functions. They are merely the asynchronous versions.