Introducing “Picture Hunt”, the newest Silverlight sample app.  This multiplayer game demonstrates the power of the System.Net Socket API inside a browser.  No more long-polls, or trying to turn HTML requests into something that’s almost a socket;...

After installing the Silverlight plugin, a Silverlight application is able to run on your computer without your explicit consent whenever you browse to a webpage which links to it. Because there is no explicit user action required to run, Silverlight...

NCL includes classes for networking related technology such as the base type System.Uri. URI’s are used extensively to identify network resources, especially on the Internet. We’ve found that different customers frequently ask us the same questions about...

In Silverlight 4, we have added multicast support. If you’re not familiar with multicast, here’s a quick scenario to explain what it is and why it might be useful to you. Scenario Overview Suppose your company provides market data and you need to...

Performance counters! You can never get enough! And starting with the .NET version 4.0 Beta 2, we in the System.Net team have added six new counters to the old set. But before we begin, some ground rules: Performance counters have to be enabled...

What’s new in System.Net.Mail We’ve made a number of enhancements to our SMTP support for .NET 4.0, mostly in the area of Unicode support and increased standards compliance, which is an important aspect in ensuring that legitimate emails do not get...

Like street numbers for a house, the Internet was originally designed so that all network devices could be directly addressed. Every connected device was given at least one unique identifier, or IP address, which could be used to route network packets...

We’re introducing some new features starting with .NET 4.0 Beta 2 that you may find useful. Additional information will be available on MSDN and in subsequent articles. If you have any questions or comments, let us know! Sockets DnsEndPoint This feature...

Silverlight restricts the ports of outgoing TCP socket connections to the range 4502 – 4534. Connecting to a different port requires the use of a server-side proxy or port redirector. One of the most common questions we hear from customers about this...

Introduction My name is Chris Ross and I work as a developer for Microsoft’s .NET Framework networking components. As part of the Network Class Library (NCL) team I get lots of networking questions from other developers. This post resulted from...

If you are wondering exactly what is in the NCL, the diagram below should help. It’s a high-level roadmap of the key feature areas and components. As you can see, the NCL is a roll up of the System.Net.* namespaces and the URI related classes in System...

In the last entry I showed you why you should use the NetworkChange.NetworkAddressChanged API to control when to check if your application is online or not. If you didn’t read that article, go do it now – it will help you understand why online detection...

Imagine this: you have been working on your great New World Wide Web program. Your very first customer tries it out on their new notebook computer -- perhaps one of those very cute tiny notebooks that people are buying everywhere. And then you get your...

This is a current compile of the team's existing blogs on FtpWebRequest. I am going to update it periodically with new blogs and links to interesting forum questions regarding FtpWebRequest. If you find intersting topics or have ideas for new topics that...

Sytem.Net tracing One of the easiest ways is to use the built in System.Net tracing. It is a matter of copiying a config file to your machine and re-running your application. Here is a very detailed article on how tracing works and how to enable it. http...

Delivering your managed networking experience. There is a chance that you have never heard about the NCL team and yet you’re using our components every day (most likely, right now while you’re reading this). How could this be? When you opened this...