Windows Core Networking

The Windows Vista TCP/IP stack has made tremendous improvements in its efficiency, taking full advantage of hardware advances (e.g. gigabit networking). As explained by Murari in a previous posting (Advances in Windows TCP/IP Networking), there are a number of bottlenecks that affect TCP throughput. Here, I will give some examples of how we’ve addressed these bottlenecks in the Windows Vista TCP/IP stack....

In Part 1 of this series I discussed the tools used to configure WinHttp today and introduced the changes happening for Windows Vista. In this post I’m looking at the Proxy settings. Again as a reminder, this is how it is for Windows Vista Beta 2 and...

Winsock Kernel (WSK) is the latest network programming interface introduced by the WNDP team in Windows Vista. As evident by its name, WSK can be used by kernel-mode drivers for sending and receiving data over the network. But less evident to many developers, WSK is not an interface for performing network “filtering”. Hence, to clarify a common misconception up front, if all you want is to perform some form of network traffic filtering or interception, then you are strongly advised to look at the Windows Filtering Platform (WFP) interface first. WFP is the one-stop shop for network filtering in Windows Vista....

WinHttp for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 comes with variety of tools that allow the users and system administrators to configure the default proxy settings ( ProxyCfg.exe ), tracing settings ( WinHttpTraceCfg.exe ) and configure client certificates...

The NetDMA term was coined by the networking team to imply a DMA (Direct Memory Access) engine that is used for moving networking data in memory. During WinHEC I will present the NetDMA architecture but for now I will give you the problem that NetDMA...

In Part 1 , Part 2 and Part 3 of this series I discussed the tools used to configure WinHttp today, introduced the changes happening for Windows Vista and how to set up proxies and tracing. In this post I’m looking at the client certificate settings....

NDIS 6.0 was introduced to the independent hardware vendor (IHV) and developer community at last year’s WinHEC. It brings the promise of greater performance, improved manageability, reduced complexity for NDIS miniports, and simpler models for writing...

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series I discussed the tools used to configure WinHttp today, introduced the changes happening for Windows Vista and how to set up proxies. In this post I’m looking at the Tracing settings. Again as a reminder, this is how...

As we worked on the Windows Vista Wireless Stack, extensibility was one of our key design goals. On previous releases, we’ve gotten a lot of feedback from hardware and software developers on how they’d like to be able to extend the wireless experience...

What if you could filter IPsec encrypted traffic? What if you could easily filter both IPv4 and IPv6 traffic? What if you could write just a few lines of user-mode code to filter applications based on port, protocol and application ID? To do all...

We’re living in a highly connected world, where a large number of diverse devices gain access to the corporate environment using diverse technologies like wireless, wired 802.1x, virtual private networks (VPN), and more. Though this diversity is a great enabler allowing end users to always have up-to-date information at their fingertips, it creates a very challenging situation for enterprise IT administrators. ...