WinSock Programming Fundamental

Thomas Bleeker

WinSock Programming Fundamental Editor: Kapil Nagwanshi Winsock ('Windows Sockets') is the Windows API that deals with networking. Many functions are implemented in the same way as the Berkeley socket functions used in BSD Unix. 15/09/2012

Table of Contents

WinSock Programming Fundamental: A Compilation [1]

You have a right to perform your prescribed duty, but you are not

entitled to the fruits of action. Never consider yourself the cause of

the results of your activities, and never be attached to not doing

your duties

||Bhagavad-Gita 2.47||

Dedicated to

My beloved students

More than meets the eye

[2]

Table of Contents

Winsock Networking Tutorial (C++)................................................................................................... 7

More than meets the eye ............................................................................................................... 7

So what do I need ................................................................................................................................. 8

1. Networking introduction ................................................................................................................... 9

1. Networks and protocols .................................................................................................................. 9

2. Ethernet ............................................................................................................................................. 9

MAC ................................................................................................................................................ 10

IP ...................................................................................................................................................... 10

TCP .................................................................................................................................................. 11

Software .......................................................................................................................................... 12

3. The Ethernet interface stack .......................................................................................................... 12

2. Networking continued ..................................................................................................................... 14

1. DNS .................................................................................................................................................. 14

2. Connections .................................................................................................................................... 14

3. Protocols again ............................................................................................................................... 16

3. Sockets and winsock ........................................................................................................................ 17

1. Sockets ............................................................................................................................................. 17

2. Binding sockets ............................................................................................................................... 18

3. Connecting ...................................................................................................................................... 18

4. Listening .......................................................................................................................................... 19

5. Connections: an example .............................................................................................................. 19

1. The server socket is created ...................................................................................................... 20

2. The server socket is bound ........................................................................................................ 20

Table of Contents


3. The server is listening ................................................................................................................ 21

4. A client creates a socket ............................................................................................................. 21

5. The client socket tries to connect .............................................................................................. 21

6. The server accepts the request .................................................................................................. 22

7. Another client connects ............................................................................................................. 23

6. Blocking ...................................................................................................................................... 23

7. Winsock versions ....................................................................................................................... 24

8. Winsock architecture ................................................................................................................ 25

4. Basic winsock functions .................................................................................................................. 26

1. WSAStartup & WSACleanup ....................................................................................................... 26

2. socket ............................................................................................................................................... 28

3. closesocket ...................................................................................................................................... 28

4. sockaddr and byte ordering .......................................................................................................... 29

5. connect ............................................................................................................................................. 32

6. bind .................................................................................................................................................. 33

7. listen................................................................................................................................................. 34

8. accept ............................................................................................................................................... 35

9. send and recv .................................................................................................................................. 36

10. Usage ............................................................................................................................................. 37

5. I/O models .......................................................................................................................................... 38

1. The need for an I/O model ........................................................................................................... 38

2. Non-blocking mode ....................................................................................................................... 38

3. I/O models ..................................................................................................................................... 39

4. Blocking sockets ............................................................................................................................. 41

5. Polling.............................................................................................................................................. 42


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6. Select ................................................................................................................................................ 43

7. Windows messages (WSAASyncSelect) ...................................................................................... 45

8. Event objects (WSAEventSelect) .................................................................................................. 47

9. Use with threads ............................................................................................................................ 48

10. Introduction to Overlapped I/O ................................................................................................ 49

11. Overlapped I/O: blocking on event .......................................................................................... 50

12. Overlapped I/O: polling ............................................................................................................. 51

13. Overlapped I/O: completion routines....................................................................................... 52

14. Overlapped I/O: completion ports ............................................................................................ 54

15. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 55

6. Blocking sockets: client ...................................................................................................................... 56

1. A simple client ................................................................................................................................ 56

2. Program example ........................................................................................................................... 58

3. Hostnames ...................................................................................................................................... 59

4. Framework ...................................................................................................................................... 59

5. Constants and global data ............................................................................................................. 60

6. The main function .......................................................................................................................... 61

7. RequestHeaders ............................................................................................................................. 62

8. Resolving the hostname to its IP .................................................................................................. 63

9. Creating a socket ............................................................................................................................ 65

10. Connecting the socket .................................................................................................................. 66

11. Sending the request...................................................................................................................... 66

12. Receiving the response ................................................................................................................ 67

13. Cleaning up ................................................................................................................................... 68

14. Finished! ........................................................................................................................................ 68

Table of Contents


15. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 68

7. Blocking sockets: server .................................................................................................................... 70

1. Program flow .................................................................................................................................. 70

2. Framework ...................................................................................................................................... 70

3. Constants and global data ............................................................................................................. 71

4. The main function .......................................................................................................................... 71

5. RunServer........................................................................................................................................ 72

6. Binding the socket .......................................................................................................................... 73

7. Letting the socket listen ................................................................................................................. 73

8. Accepting connections ................................................................................................................... 74

9. HandleConnection ......................................................................................................................... 75

10. Testing ........................................................................................................................................... 76

11. Source code ................................................................................................................................... 77

12. Conclusion .................................................................................................................................... 78


[6]

Winsock Networking Tutorial (C++)


Winsock Networking Tutorial (C++)

Compilation of Network Resources: Kapil Nagwanshi

(BE-Hon's,ME,PhD(P),MIEEE, MIEEECS, MIEEEComSoc, LMCSI, MIAENG, MIACSIT)

Please take the time to read this introduction, so you will know why things are the way

they are.As networking is a topic not only limited to win32asm (luckily :) and most of the tutor

can also be applied to other programming languages, I've decided to give the reader the option

to choose between win32asm and C++. Most of the tutor will be the same for both languages,

but the code samples and explanations will be in the language of your choice. Win32asm will be

MASM specific as usual; users of other assemblers should be able to convert it easily. Originally

my intent was to create a plain vanilla C version, but I switched to C++. However the ++ in C++

(ie. the OOP part) will be used mainly to provide clean data structures in the examples. The

code that actually deals with the winsock programming is not really affected by the differences

between C and C++, C programmers can benefit from the winsock tutorial as well. I'll test the

code with msvc, bcc and gcc so you shouldn't have much trouble using it with your favorite

compiler. One side note for the diehard asm programmers: the asm examples will be written for

clarity and focused on networking so I will lay optimizations aside.


Network programming seems easier than it is. The winsock functions you

can use to communicate over a network are pretty straightforward and easy to use, but many

So what do I need

[8]

people forget that just calling functions will not do the trick. First attempts in winsock

programming often end in programs that work 'sometimes', not at all or produce seemingly

inexplicable errors.

There's more to it than just receiving or sending data. For example, you will have to deal

with synchronization: is everything sent or received? is the program ready to send it's next

piece of data? Other problems are validation of the received data, parsing it, prevention of

security risks and much more.

Because of this, you will find that the first tutorials will not contain much code. This is to get

you started with network basics and everything concerned with networking programming

before starting to write programs. Do not skip these tutorials inpatiently, it's very important to

read them.

So what do I need A good winsock API reference. While this file will do for most purposes, the latest

platform SDK would be even better. If you have a fast connection, get the latest PSDK

(VS 2012). It includes the latest documentation on winsock 2.

If you're running win2K or XP, download the 'Winsock Debug Tool' from

http://www.madwizard.org/programming/toolarchive . This little tool shows all open

socket handles and the data that is sent or received via the sockets.

Experience with the win32asm or C++. This tutorial only focusses on the networking

aspect of programming. I assume you have enough knowledge of the language of your

choice to follow this tutorial.

▌▌▌▌

http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/

http://www.madwizard.org/programming/toolarchive

1. Networking introduction



First I will give you an introduction to basic networking principles and terms. Anyone with

internet access will have some knowledge about networks, servers, clients, but to ensure you

know enough to program with it I've included this chapter. You won't need all the details

mentioned here when programming winsock, but it's good to know something about the

underlying techniques.

1. Networks and protocols You probably already know what a network is, it's a collection of computers connected to each

other so they can exchange data. There are several types of networks, such as LANs (Local Area

Network), WANs (Wide Area Network) and of course the internet. To ensure that all traffic is

going smoothly, networks rely on protocols:

Protocol

A protocol is a set of rules describing the format in which data is transmitted over a network.

As stated in the information box above, a protocol describes how to communicate over a

network. It can be compared with a human language: at the lowest level nearly everyone can

make and hear sounds (compare: electronic signals) but people won't understand each other

unless they speak a according to a specific language they both understand (compare: protocol).

2. Ethernet Networks rely on several protocol layers, each one having its own task in the communication

process. A very commonly used configuration is the ethernet LAN with TCP/IP. In ethernet

LANs, computers can be connected using coaxial, twisted pair (UTP) or optic fiber cables.

Nowadays, for most networks, UTP cables are used. WANs and the internet (partly a

combination of many WANs) use many of the techniques used in ethernet LANs, so I will

discuss ethernet LAN technology first.

2. Ethernet

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MAC

The lowest layer of ethernet is the hardware level, called the Media Access Layer, or MAC for

short. This layer can be a network card, for example, which contains the serial network interface

and controller that take care of converting the raw data into electronic signals and sending it to

the right place.

Package that are sent over a network of course need to reach their destination. So there has to be

some kind of addressing. Various levels of the ethernet interface have different addressing

methods, as you will see later. At the lowest MAC level, addressing is done with MAC

numbers.

MAC number

48-bit identifier that is hardcoded into each network interface unit. The allocation of these numbers is

done by the IEEE Registration Authority so each ethernet chip has a world wide unique number (that is, if

the manufacturer didn't mess up :). MAC numbers are often noted as colon-separated hex numbers:

14:74:A0:17:95:D7.

To send a packet to another network interface, the packet needs to include its MAC number.

LANs use a very simple method to send the packets to the right interface: broadcasting. This

means that your network card just shouts the package to every other interface it can reach. Each

receiving interface looks at the destination MAC number of the packet, and only buffers it if

matches its own MAC number. While this method is easy to implement and quite effective on

LANs, bigger networks (WANs, internet) don't use this method for obvious reasons; you

wouldn't want everyone on the internet to send packets to everyone else on the internet. WANs

use better routing mechanisms, which I won't discuss here. Just remember that at the lowest

level, addressing is done with MAC numbers. Ethernet packets also include a CRC and error

detection.

IP

Just above the hardware level is the IP level. IP simply stands for Internet Protocol. Just like the

MAC layer, IP too has its own way of addressing:

IP number



The numbers used to address at the IP level of the network interface. IPv4, the version most widely used

uses 32-bit values, noted in the well known dotted format: 209.217.52.4. Unlike MAC numbers, IP

numbers are not hardcoded into the hardware, they are assigned to it at software level.

IP numbers shouldn't be something strange to you. The internet uses them to uniquely identify

a specific computer. IP addresses can be assigned to a network interface using software. Doing

this associates the IP number with the MAC address of the network interface. To address using

IP numbers, the associated MAC number needs to be resolved. This is done with the ARP

(Address Resolution Protocol). Each host maintains a list with pairs of IP and MAC numbers. If

an IP is used without a matching MAC number, the host sends out a query packet to the rest of

the LAN. If any of the other computers in the LAN recognize their IP number, it sends back the

corresponding MAC number. If no matching MAC number can be found the packet is sent to

the gateway, a computer that forwards packages to external networks. The IP to MAC

conversion is actually done at the data link layer (MAC layer)

The IP protocol adds the source and destination address (IP numbers) to the packet, as well as

some other package properties such as the TTL hops (time to live hops), the protocol version

used, header checksum, sequence count and some more fields. They are not important to us so I

won't explain them in detail.

TCP

The next layer is the TCP layer (or alternatively, the UDP layer). This layer is very close to the

network application and deals with many things. As final addition to the addressing, TCP adds

a port number to the package:

Port number

While IP numbers are used to address a specific computer or network device, port numbers are used to

identify which process running on that device should receive the package. Port numbers are 16-bit, and

thus limited to 65536 numbers. A process can register to receive packets sent to a specific port number

('listening'). A notation often used when addressing a port number on a device is 'IP:portnumber', eg.

209.217.52.4:80. Both sides of a connection use a port number, but not necessarily the same.

Many port numbers are WKP (Well Known Ports), that is they are commonly associated with a

specific service. For example, the WWW uses port 80 by default, FTP uses port 21, e-mail uses

25 (SMTP) and 110 (POP). Although these are the ports usually used for those services, nobody

3. The Ethernet interface stack

[12]

prevents you from using different ports. However, it's a good practice to use port numbers

higher than 1024 for other, custom services.

While the IP layer doesn't care about the success of transmissions, TCP does. The TCP layer

ensures data does arrive, and correctly. It also lets the receiver control the data flow, ie. the

receiver can decide when to receive data. If a package is lost during the way to its destination,

TCP resends the package. TCP also reorders the packages if they arrive in an order different

from the original order. This makes the programmer's life easy as it can safely assume the data

that is sent is received and in the right order. UDP, an alternative for TCP, does not have these

features and cannot guarantee the arrival of packages. TCP is connection-oriented, and the best

choice for continuous data streams. UDP on the other hand is connectionless, and packet

oriented. I won't deal with UDP in this tutorial.

Software

Finally, above the TCP layer is the network software. In windows, your application does not

directly access the TCP layer but uses the WinSock API. The software layer provides a very

convenient way of dealing with networking. Thanks to all the underlying layers, you don't need

to worry about packets, packet size, data corruption, resending of lost packets etc.

3. The Ethernet interface stack



The image above shows the encapsulation of the each protocol in the ethernet interface stack. It

all starts with the software layer, which has a piece of data that it wants to send over the

network. Even this data usually has a format (eg. HTTP, FTP protocols), although not shown in

the image. The user data first gets a TCP header including the source and destination port

number. Then the IP header is added, containing the source and destination IP address. Finally

the data link layer adds the ethernet header, which specifies the MAC numbers of the source

and destination. This is the data that is actually sent over the wires. As you can see there's a lot

of overhead in an TCP/IP package. The overhead can be minimized by choosing a large enough

data size for the package. Luckily winsock will arrange this for you.

▌▌▌▌

1. DNS

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2. Networking continued

Now that you know the basic layers of the network interface, I will continue with some other

principles concerning hostnames, connections and software level protocols.

1. DNS DNS stands for Domain Name System, which accounts for the conversion of hostnames to and

from IP numbers. Because IP numbers are not easy to remember (well not many at least),

another more convenient naming system was created. Now, instead of an IP number, you could

use a hostname alternatively. Examples of hostnames are: madwizard.org,

somepc.someuniversity.edu, www.google.com, etc. Anyone browsing the internet has used

them. When connecting to a website, its IP is needed. So if you enter a hostname like

www.google.com, it first needs to lookup the corresponding IP number of google. This is where

DNS comes in. Your PC sends out a hostname lookup request to the DNS your provider has

setup in its network. If the DNS can resolve the hostname, it sends back the corresponding IP to

you. DNS are organized in a hierarchical way, forwarding unresolvable hostnames to a DNS at

a higher level, until the hostname is resolved.

2. Connections TCP/IP is a connection-oriented protocol. The connection is always between two devices, and

each side uses its own IP and port number. Usually, one side is called the client, the other side

the server.

2. Networking continued


The client is the one that requests something, the server responses accordingly. For example,

when opening a website, the browser is the client, the webserver is the server. The browser

initiates the connection with the server and requests a specific resource. The server then sends

back a response and the data requested.

The server is continually waiting for incoming connections. This is called listening, which is

always done on a certain IP and port number. The client is only active when necessary, as the

client is always the initiator of a connection and the one that requests information. To create a

connection, the client needs to know both the IP and port number the server is listening on. A

connection is made to that server and hopefully accepted by the server. While communication

over a TCP/IP connection is two-way, many protocols (HTTP, FTP, etc) let the client and server

interact in turn.

Both the server and client side use an IP and port number, but the IP and port number of the

server are usually fixed. The standard port for the WWW is 80 (using HTTP). Google for

example, is a webserver that runs on port 80 and IP 216.239.39.101 (at the moment of writing).

Each client (read: anyone google-ing :) connects to this IP and port. So the webserver can have

many connections on the same port. This is no problem, since all traffic on that port is for the

same process. On the client side, the port number doesn't matter. Any port can be used. Some

people think that the port number used in a connection needs to be the same on both sides. This

is not true. Just open a website and quickly run 'netstat -an' in a command line. You might see a

line like this:

TCP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:2894 216.239.39.101:80 ESTABLISHED

xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx was my IP, 216.239.39.101 is google's IP. The number after the colon is the port

number. As you can see, the server side uses port 80, while the client uses a random (read: some

free) port number like 2894. Each client connection needs a different port number on the client

side, since every connection is associated with a different client.

Client

The program that initiates the connection, and requests information.

Server

3. Protocols again

[16]

The program that listens for incoming connections, accepts them and responses according to the received

requests. The IP and port number of the server need to be known by the client to connect to it.

3. Protocols again

In the previous chapters I have showed several protocols at the different levels of a network

interface. The protocols I didn't discuss yet are the protocols that work at software level.

Examples of these are HTTP, FTP, POP3, SMTP. Most of them work in a client-server way, ie.

the client makes requests, the server responds. The exact format of the requests and responses

are described in these protocols. I won't discuss them further right now, but I will later when

you know the winsock basics to actually implement them.

▌▌▌▌

3. Sockets and winsock



Winsock ('Windows Sockets') is the Windows API that deals with networking. Many functions

are implemented in the same way as the Berkeley socket functions used in BSD Unix.

1. Sockets

So what's a socket?

Socket

As explained in the previous chapter, you will work with two-way connections. The endpoints of this

connection are the sockets. Both the client and the server have a socket. A socket is associated with a

certain IP and port number.

Almost all winsock functions operate on a socket, as it's your handle to the connection. Both

sides of the connection use a socket, and they are not platform-specific (ie. a Windows and Unix

machine can talk to each other using sockets). Sockets are also two-way, data can be both sent

and received on a socket.

There are two common types for a socket, one is a streaming socket (SOCK_STREAM), the other

is a datagram socket (SOCK_DGRAM). The streaming variant is designed for applications that

need a reliable connection, often using continuous streams of data. The protocol used for this

type of socket is TCP. I will only use this type in my tutorial as it's most commonly used for the

well known protocols like HTTP, TCP, SMTP, POP3 etc.

Datagram sockets use UDP as underlying protocol, are connectionless, and have a maximum

buffer size. They are intended for applications that send data in small packages and that do not

require perfect reliability.

Unlike streaming sockets, datagram sockets do not guarantee data will reach its destination nor

that it comes in the right order. Datagram sockets can be slightly faster and useful for

2. Binding sockets

[18]

applications like streaming audio or video, where reliability is not as high on the priority list as

speed and latency. Where the reliability is required, streaming sockets are used.

2. Binding sockets Binding a socket means associating a specific address (IP & port number) with a given socket.

This can be done manually using the bind function, but in some cases winsock will

automatically bind the socket. This will become clear in the next paragraphs.

3. Connecting The way you use a socket depends on whether you are on the client side or the server side. The

client side initiates a connection by creating a socket, and calling the connect function with the

specified address information. Before the socket is connected, it is not bound yet to an IP or port

number. Because the client side can use any IP and port number for the connection with the

server (provided that network the IP number is part of can reach the network of the destination

IP), often many useable combinations are possible.

When connect is called, winsock will choose the IP and port number to use for the connection

and bind the socket to it before actually connecting it. The port number can be anything that is

free at the moment, the IP number needs a bit more care. PCs may have more than one IP. For

example, a PC connected to both the internet and a local network has at least three IPs (the

external IP for use with the internet, the local network IP (192.168.x.x, 10.0.x.x etc.) and the loop

back address (127.0.0.1)).

Here, it does matter to which IP the socket is bound as it also determines the network you are

using for the connection. If you want to connect to the local PC 192.168.0.4, you cannot do that

using the network of your internet provider, as that IP is never used in the internet and will not

be found. So you would have to bind the socket to your IP in the same network (192.168.0.1 for

example). Similarly, when you bind the socket to the local loop back address (127.0.0.1), you can

only connect to that same address, as no other address exist in that 'network'.

Fortunately, winsock will choose a local IP it can use for the IP you want to connect to

automatically. Nothing stops you from binding the socket yourself, but remember that you

need to take the situations above in consideration.



Note that the bind function gives the user the option to set the IP or port number to zero. In this

case, zero means 'let winsock choose something for me'. This is useful when you do want to

connect using a specific IP on the client side, but do not care about the port number used.

4. Listening Things are different on the server side. A server has to wait for incoming connections and

clients will need to know both the IP and port number of the server to be able to connect to it.

To make things easy, servers almost always use a fixed port number (often the default port

number for the used protocol).

Waiting for incoming connections on a specified address is called listening:

Listening

A socket is listening when it is in a state where it will 'listen' for incoming connections. Usually, this is

done on a socket bound to a specific address known to the client.

As you can see from the definition above, sockets are often bound to an address before putting

it in the listening state. When the port number of this address is set to a fixed number, the server

will listen for incoming connections on that port number specifically. For example, port 80 (the

default for HTTP) is listened on by most web servers. The socket can be bound to a specific IP as

well but when zero is chosen it will listen on any addresses available, effectively allowing

connections from all networks. It may be set to a fixed IP, for example the IP of the local

network interface, so computers from the local network can connect to the server but not the

ones connected via the internet.

When a client requests a connection to a listening server, the server will accept it (or not) and

spawn another socket which will be the endpoint of the connection. This way the listening

socket is not used for any data transfer on the connection and can continue listening for more

incoming connections.

5. Connections: an example Here's a graphical example of a webserver that can handle multiple connections.

5. Connections: an example

[20]

1. The server socket is created

The server creates a new socket. When it's just created it is not yet bound to an IP or port

number.

2. The server socket is bound

Because the server is a webserver, it will be bound to port number 80, the default for HTTP.

However the IP number is set to zero, indicating the server is willing to recieve incoming

connections from all IPs available for the machine it runs on. In this example, we assume the

server has three IPs, one external (216.239.39.101), one internal (192.168.0.8) and of course the

loop back address (127.0.0.1).



3. The server is listening

After the socket is bound, it is put into the listening state, waiting for in-coming connections on

port 80.

4. A client creates a socket

Assume a client in the same local network as the server (192.168.x.x) wants to request a

webpage from the server. To do the data transfer it needs a socket so it creates one.

5. The client socket tries to connect

5. Connections: an example

[22]

The client socket is left unbound and tries to connect to the webserver.

6. The server accepts the request

The listening socket sees some client wants to make a connection. It accepts it by creating a new

socket (on the bottom right) bound to the one of the IPs of itself which can be reached by the

client (ie. they are in the same network, being 192.168.x.x) and the server port (80). From this

point, the client socket and the server connection socket just created will do the data transfers,

while the listening socket will keep listening for other connections. Note that the client socket is

now bound to an IP and port since it's connected. The dotted gray line shows the separation of

the client and server side.



7. Another client connects

If another client (from the external network) connects, the server will again create a new socket

to deal with the second connection. Note that the IP the socket on the server side is bound to is

different than the one from the first connection. This is possible because the listening server

socket was not bound to any IP. If it had been bound to 192.168.0.8, the second connection

would not be possible.

6. Blocking The original functions in the Berkeley Unix implementation of sockets were blocking functions.

This means that they will just wait when the operation requested cannot be completed

immediately. For example, when connecting to a server using the connect function, it did not

return until the connection had been made (or failed), thus making the program hang for a

while. This is not really a problem when dealing with a single connection using a console mode

application but in the Windows environment, this behavior is rarely acceptable. Any program

with a window has a window procedure that has to be kept running. Stalling it would delay

7. Winsock versions

[24]

user input, window painting, notifications, and any other messages resulting in an application

that seems to be hanging while it's using socket functions.

To deal with this problem, winsock can set sockets into blocking or non-blocking mode. The

former (blocking mode) is the original way of using sockets, ie. not returning from the API

before the operation has finished (it will literally block the application). The latter (non-blocking

mode) is the mode you usually use when dealing with a real windows application (ie. not a

console application). When calling a function on a socket that is in non-blocking mode, the

function will always return as soon as possible, even when the operation to be performed could

not be completed immediately. Instead, a notification of some sort will be sent to the program

when the operation is finished, allowing the program to execute in the normal manner while the

operation is unfinished.

Winsock provides several methods of notification for non-blocking sockets, including window

messages and event objects. These methods will be discussed in detail later, for now just

remember there difference between blocking and non-blocking.

7. Winsock versions The most commonly used winsock version is version 2.x, usually just called winsock 2 as there

are only minor differences. The latest version before version 2 was version 1.1. Some people say

you should use this version for compatibility reasons, as Windows 95 and NT 3 only ship

version 1.1. However, all later windows versions (98, ME, NT4, 2000 and XP) have version 2 by

default and for Windows 95 an update is available. So I recommend you just start with winsock

2, it adds a lot of nice features and windows machines without winsock 2 are getting rare.

The two major versions of winsock reside in two different DLLs, wsock32.dll and ws2_32.dll,

being version 1.1 and version 2.x respectively. The libraries to use are wsock32.lib and

ws2_32.lib. The MASM32 package has most winsock constants in its windows.inc, for C++

programs including windows.h suffices, it will include the winsock 2 definitions if the

_WIN32_WINNT constant is at least 0x400 (NT version 4). The winsock 2 API includes the full

1.1 API (with some minor changes), wsock32.dll is even just a wrapper for the actual winsock

ws2_32.dll.

This tutorial will assume you are using winsock 2.

http://www.microsoft.com/windows95/downloads/contents/WURecommended/S_WUNetworking/dunwinsky2k/Default.asp



8. Winsock architecture Winsock provides two interfaces, the Application Programming Interface (API) and the Service

Provider Interface (SPI). This tutorial is about the API, it contains all the functions you need to

communicate using the well-known protocols. The SPI is an interface to add Data Transport

Providers (like TCP/IP or IPX/SPX) or Name Space Service Providers (like DNS). These

extensions are transparent to the user of the API.

▌▌▌▌

1. WSAStartup & WSACleanup

[26]

4. Basic winsock functions

In this chapter of the winsock tutorial, I will show you the basic winsock functions that operate

on sockets. It is important to remember that this chapter is only an introduction to the socket

functions, so you will be able to follow the next tutorials. Do not start coding immediately after

you've read this chapter, the next chapters are just as important.

The basic functionality of each function is relatively simple, but things like the blocking mode

make it more complicated than it looks at first sight. The next chapters will cover the details, but

first you need to be familiar with the functions.

This chapter is quite long and you might not remember everything but that's okay. Just read it

carefully so you know what I'm talking about in the next chapters, you can always look back

here and use it as a quick reference.

1. WSAStartup & WSACleanup

int WSAStartup(WORD wVersionRequested, LPWSADATA lpWSAData);

int WSACleanup();

Before calling any winsock function, you need to initialize the winsock library. This is done

with WSAStartup. It takes two parameters:

wVersionRequested

Highest version of Windows Sockets support that the caller can use. The high-order byte

specifies the minor version (revision) number; the low-order byte specifies the major

version number.

lpWSAData

Pointer to the WSADATA data structure that is to receive details of the Windows

Sockets implementation.

As explained in the introduction, I will use winsock 2. This means you need to set the low byte

of wVersionRequested to 2, the high byte can be zero (the revision number is not important).



The WSADATA structure specified with the lpWSAData parameter will receive some

information about the winsock version installed.

The function returns zero if it succeeded, otherwise you can call WSAGetLastError to see what

went wrong. WSAGetLastError is the winsock equivalent of the win32 APIs GetLastError, it

retrieves the code of the last occurred error.

It is important to note that you might not get the version you requested in the

wVersionRequested parameter. This parameter specifies the highest winsock version your

application *supports*, not 'requires'. Winsock will try hard to give you the version you

requested but if that is not possible, it uses a lower version. This version is available after the

call, in the wVersion member of the WSADATA structure. You should check this version after

the call to see if you really got the winsock version you wanted. There is also a member called

wHighVersion that gives the highest winsock version supported by the system. In short:

wVersionRequested parameter: The highest winsock version your application supports.

wHighVersion in WSADATA: The highest winsock version the system supports.

wVersion in WSADATA: min(wVersionRequested, wHighVersion).

Each call to WSAStartup has to match a call to WSACleanup, which cleans up the winsock

library. Although useless, WSAStartup may be called more than once, as long as WSACleanup

is called the same number of times.

An example of initializing and cleaning up winsock:

const int iReqWinsockVer = 2; // Minimum winsock version required

WSADATA wsaData;

if (WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(iReqWinsockVer,0), &wsaData)==0)

{

// Check if major version is at least iReqWinsockVer

if (LOBYTE(wsaData.wVersion) >= iReqWinsockVer)

{

/* ------- Call winsock functions here ------- */

}

else

{

// Required version not available

}

2. socket

[28]

// Cleanup winsock

if (WSACleanup()!=0)

{

// cleanup failed

}

}

else

{

// startup failed

}

2. socket

SOCKET socket(int af, int type, int protocol);

The socket function creates a new socket and returns a handle to it. The handle is of type

SOCKET and is used by all functions that operate on the socket. The only invalid socket handle

value is INVALID_SOCKET (defined as ~0), all other values are legal (this includes the value

zero!). Its parameters are:

af

The address family to use. Use AF_INET to use the address family of TCP & UDP.

type

The type of socket to create. Use SOCK_STREAM to create a streaming socket

(using TCP), or SOCK_DGRAM to create a diagram socket (using UDP). For more

information on socket types, see the previous chapter.

protocol

The protocol to be used, this value depends on the address family. You can

specify IPPROTO_TCP here to create a TCP socket.

The return value is a handle to the new socket, or INVALID_SOCKET if something went

wrong. The socket function can be used like this:

SOCKET hSocket;

hSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP);

if (hSocket==INVALID_SOCKET)

{

// error handling code

}

3. closesocket



int closesocket(SOCKET s);

Closesocket closes a socket. It returns zero if no error occurs, SOCKET_ERROR otherwise. Each

socket you created with socket has to be closed with an appropriate closesocket call.

s

Handle to the socket to be closed. Do not use this socket handle after you called

this function.

The use of closesocket is pretty straightforward:

closesocket(hSocket);

However, in real situations some more operations are necessary to close the socket properly.

This will be discussed later in the tutorial.

4. sockaddr and byte ordering Because winsock was made to be compatible with several protocols including ones that might

be added later (using the SPI) a general way of addressing has to be used. TCP/IP uses an IP

and port number to specify an address, but other protocols might do it differently. If winsock

forced a certain way of addressing, adding other protocols may not have been possible. The first

version of winsock solved this with the sockaddr structure:

struct sockaddr

{

u_short sa_family;

char sa_data[14];

};

In this structure, the first member (sa_family) specifies the address family the address is for. The

data stored in the sa_data member can vary among different address families. We will only use

the internet address family (TCP/IP) in this tutorial, winsock has defined a structure

sockaddr_in that is the TCP/IP version of the sockaddr structure. They are essentially the same

structure, but the second is obviously easier to manipulate.

struct sockaddr_in

{

short sin_family;

u_short sin_port;

struct in_addr sin_addr;

4. sockaddr and byte ordering

[30]

char sin_zero[8];

};

The last 8 bytes of the structure are not used but are padded (with sin_zero) to give the

structure the right size (the same size as sockaddr).

Before proceeding, it is important to know about the network byte order. In case you don't

know, byte ordering is the order in which values that span multiple bytes are stored. For

example, a 32-bit integer value like 0x12345678 spans four 8-bit bytes. Intel x86 machines use the

'little-endian' order, which means the least significant byte is stored first. So the value

0x12345678 would be stored as the byte sequence 0x78, 0x56, 0x34, 0x12. Most machines that

don't use little-endian use big-endian, which is exactly the opposite: the most significant byte is

stored first. The same value would then be stored as 0x12, 0x34, 0x56, 0x78. Because protocol

data can be transferred between machines with different byte ordering, a standard is needed to

prevent the machines from interpreting the data the wrong way.

Network byte ordering

Because protocols like TCP/IP have to work between different type of systems with different type of byte

ordering, the standard is that values are stored in big-endian format, also called network byte order.

For example, a port number (which is a 16-bit number) like 12345 (0x3039) is stored with its most

significant byte first (ie. first 0x30, then 0x39). A 32-bit IP address is stored in the same way, each part of

the IP number is stored in one byte, and the first part is stored in the first byte. For example,

216.239.51.100 is stored as the byte sequence '216,239,51,100', in that order.

Apart from the sin_family value of sockaddr and sockaddr_in, which is not part of the protocol

but tells winsock which address family to use, all the values in both structures have to be in

network byte order. Winsock provides several functions to deal with the conversion between

the byte order of the local host and the network byte order:

// Convert a u_short from host to TCP/IP network byte order.

u_short htons(u_short hostshort);

// Convert a u_long from host to TCP/IP network byte order.

u_long htonl(u_long hostlong);

// Convert a u_long from TCP/IP network order to host byte order.

u_short ntohs(u_short netshort);

// Convert a u_long from TCP/IP network order to host byte order.

u_long ntohl(u_long netlong);



You might question why we should need four API functions for such simple operations as

swapping the bytes of a short or long (as that's enough to convert from little-endian (intel) to

big-endian (network)). This is because these APIs will work even if you are running your

program on a machine with other byte ordering than an intel machine (that is, the APIs are

platform independent), like Windows CE on a handheld using a big-endian processor. Whether

you use these APIs or your own macros/functions is up to you. Just know that the API way is

guaranteed to work on all systems.

Back to the sockaddr_in structure, as said above, all members except for sin_family have to be

in network byte order. For sin_family use AF_INET. sin_port is the port number of the address

(16-bit), sin_addr is the IP address (32-bit), declared as an union to manipulate the full 32-bit

word, the two 16-bit parts or each byte separately. sin_zero is not used.

Here are several examples of initializing sockaddr_in structures:

sockaddr_in sockAddr1, sockAddr2;

// Set address family

sockAddr1.sin_family = AF_INET;

/* Convert port number 80 to network byte order and assign it to

the right structure member. */

sockAddr1.sin_port = htons(80);

/* inet_addr converts a string with an IP address in dotted format to

a long value which is the IP in network byte order.

sin_addr.S_un.S_addr specifies the long value in the address union */

sockAddr1.sin_addr.S_un.S_addr = inet_addr("127.0.0.1");

// Set address of sockAddr2 by setting the 4 byte parts:

sockAddr2.sin_addr.S_un.S_un_b.s_b1 = 127;




The inet_addr function in the example above can convert an IP address in dotted string format

to the appropriate 32-bit value in network byte order. There is also a function called inet_ntoa,

which does exactly the opposite.

As a side note, winsock 2 does not require that the structure used to address a socket is the same

size of sockaddr, only that the first short is the address family and that the right structure size is

passed to the functions using it. This allows new protocols to use larger structures. The

5. connect

[32]

sockaddr structure is provided for backwards compatibility. However, since we will only use

TCP/IP in this tutorial, the sockaddr_in structure can be used perfectly.

5. connect

int connect(SOCKET s, const struct sockaddr *name, int namelen);

The connect function connects a socket with a remote socket. This function is used on the client

side of a connection, as you are the one initiating it. A short description of its parameters:

s

The unconnected socket you want to connect.

name

Pointer to a sockaddr structure that contains the name (address) of the remote

socket to connect to.

namelen

Size of the structure pointed to by name.

The first parameter s is the client socket used for the connection. For example, a socket you've

just created with the socket function. The other two parameters, name and namelen are used to

address the remote socket (the server socket that is listening for incoming connections). This is

done by using a sockaddr structure (or sockaddr_in for TCP/IP), as described in the previous

section.

A possible use of this function is connecting to a webserver to request a page. To address the

server, you can use sockaddr_in structure and fill it with the server's IP and port number. You

might wonder how you get the IP of a hostname like www.madwizard.org, I will show you

how to do that later. For now, just assume you know the server's IP number.

Assuming a webserver is running on a local network PC with IP number 192.168.0.5, using the

default HTTP port 80, this would be the code to connect to the server:

/* This code assumes a socket has been created and its handle

is stored in a variable called hSocket */

sockaddr_in sockAddr;

sockAddr.sin_family = AF_INET;



sockAddr.sin_port = htons(80);

sockAddr.sin_addr.S_un.S_addr = inet_addr("192.168.0.5");

// Connect to the server

if (connect(hSocket, (sockaddr*)(&sockAddr), sizeof(sockAddr))!=0)

{


}

/* Note: the (sockaddr*) cast is necessary because connect requires a

sockaddr type variable and the sockAddr variable is of the sockaddr_in

type. It is safe to cast it since they have the same structure, but the

compiler naturally sees them as different types. */

6. bind

int bind(SOCKET s, const struct sockaddr *name, int namelen);

Binding a socket has been explained in the previous chapter. By binding a socket you assign an

address to a socket. Bind's parameters are:

s

The unbound socket you want to bind.

name

Pointer to a sockaddr structure that contains the address to assign to the socket.

namelen

Size of the structure pointed to by name.

For TCP/IP, the sockadrr_in structure can be used as usually. Let's look at an example first:

sockaddr_in sockAddr;

sockAddr.sin_family = AF_INET;

sockAddr.sin_port = htons(80);

sockAddr.sin_addr.S_un.S_addr = INADDR_ANY; // use default

// Bind socket to port 80

if (bind(hSocket, (sockaddr*)(&sockAddr), sizeof(sockAddr))!=0)

{


}

As you can see, a sockaddr_in structure is filled with the necessary information. The address

family is AF_INET for TCP/IP. In the example, we bind the socket to port number 80, but not to

7. listen

[34]

an IP number. By specifying the INADDR_ANY value as IP address, winsock will choose an

address for you. This can be very useful for PCs with multiple network adapters (and thus

multiple IPs). If you do want to bind to a specific IP, just convert the IP to a DWORD in network

byte order and put it in the structure. Something similar is possible with the port number; when

you specify 0 as the port number winsock will assign a unique port with a value between 1024

and 5000. However, most of the time you want to bind to a specific port number.

Binding is usually done before putting the socket in a listening state, to make the socket listen

on the right port number (and optionally an IP number). Although you can also bind a socket

before connecting it, this is not commonly done because the address of the socket on the client

side is not important most of the time.

7. listen

int listen(SOCKET s, int backlog);

The listen function puts a socket in the listening state, that is it will be listening for incoming

connections. It has two parameters:

s

The bound, unconnected socket you want to set into the listening state.

backlog

Maximum length of the queue of pending connections.

The backlog parameter can be set to specify the length of the queue of pending connections that

have not yet been accepted. Usually, you can use the default value SOMAXCONN, allowing

the underlying service provider to choose a reasonable value.

Before listen is called, the socket must have been bound to an address, as shown in the previous

section. For example, if you bind a socket to port 80 and then call listen on the socket, all

incoming connections on port 80 will be routed to your application. To actually accept the

connection, another function called accept is available, it will be explained in the next section.

The following code snippet shows how to call the listen function on a socket that has been

bound already:



/* This code assumes the socket specified by

hSocket is bound with the bind function */

if (listen(hSocket, SOMAXCONN)!=0)

{


}

8. accept

SOCKET accept(SOCKET s, struct sockaddr *addr, int *addrlen);

When the socket is in the listening state and an incoming connection arrives, you can accept it

with the accept function.

s

The socket that has been placed in a listening state with the listen function.

addr

Optional pointer to a buffer that receives the address of the remote socket. This

parameter is a pointer to a sockaddr structure, but its exact structure is

determined by the address family.

addrlen

Optional pointer to an integer that contains the length of addr. Before calling the

function, the value should be the size of the buffer pointed to by addr. On return,

the value is the size of the data returned in the buffer.

As you know, when a connection is accepted a new socket is created on the server side. This

new socket is connected to the client socket, all operations on that connection are done with that

socket. The original listening socket is not connected, but instead listens for more incoming

connections.

sockaddr_in remoteAddr;

int iRemoteAddrLen;

SOCKET hRemoteSocket;

iRemoteAddrLen = sizeof(remoteAddr);

hRemoteSocket = accept(hSocket, (sockaddr*)&remoteAddr, &iRemoteAddrLen);

if (hRemoteSocket==INVALID_SOCKET)

{


}

9. send and recv

[36]

If accept succeeds, a connection is established and the return value is a new socket handle that is

the server side of the new connection. Optionally, you can set the addr and addrlen parameters

that will receive a sockaddr structure containing the remote address information (IP & port

number).

9. send and recv

int send(SOCKET s, const char *buf, int len, int flags);

s

The connected socket to send data on.

buf

Pointer to a buffer containing the data to send

len

Length of the data pointed to by buf.

flags

Specifies the way in which the call is made.

int recv(SOCKET s, char *buf, int len, int flags);

s

The connected socket to receive data from.

buf

Pointer to a buffer that will receive the data.

len

Length of the buffer pointed to by buf.

flags

Specifies the way in which the call is made.

To transfer data on a connection, you use the send and recv functions. Send sends the data in

the buffer on the socket and returns the number of bytes sent. Recv receives the data that is

currently available at the socket and stores it in the buffer. The flags parameter can usually be

set to zero for both recv and send.



In blocking mode, send will block until all data has been sent (or an error occurred) and recv

will return as much information as is currently available, up to the size of the buffer specified.

Although these functions may seem simple at first, they become more complicated in non-

blocking mode. When a socket is in non-blocking mode, these functions cannot block until the

operation is finished so they may not perform the operation fully (ie. not all data is sent), or not

at all. The next chapter will explain these issues in great detail, I won't discuss it here since this

only a function overview.

This example of recv and send on a connected socket in blocking mode will just send back all

data it receives.

char buffer[128];

while(true)

{

// Receive data

int bytesReceived = recv(hRemoteSocket, buffer, sizeof(buffer), 0);

if (bytesReceived==0) // connection closed

{

break;

}

else if (bytesReceived==SOCKET_ERROR)

{


}

// Send received data back

if (send(hRemoteSocket, buffer, bytesReceived, 0)==SOCKET_ERROR)

{


}

}

10. Usage

As stated in this chapter's introduction, this was only an overview of the main winsock

functions. Just knowing how the functions is not enough to program correctly with winsock.

The next chapters will tell you how to use them correctly, which I/O strategies exist and how

blocking and non-blocking mode works.

▌▌▌▌

1. The need for an I/O model

[38]

5. I/O models

In chapter 3 I briefly touched blocking and non-blocking sockets, which play a role in the

available winsock I/O models. An I/O model is the method you use to control the program

flow of the code that deals with the network input and output. Winsock provides several

functions to design an I/O strategy, I will discuss them all here in short to get an overview.

Later in the tutorial I will deal with most models separately and show some examples of them.

1. The need for an I/O model So why do you need an I/O model? We don't have infinite network speed, so when you send or

receive data the operation you asked for may not be completed immediately. Especially with

networks, which are slow compared to 'normal', local operations. How do you handle this? You

could choose to do other things while you're waiting to try again, or let your program wait until

the operation is done, etc. The best choice depends on the structure and requirements of your

program.

Originally, Berkeley sockets used the blocking I/O model. This means that all socket functions

operate synchronously, ie. they will not return before the operation is finished. This kind of

behavior is often undesirable in the Windows environment, because often user input and

output should still be processed even while network operations might occur (I explained this

earlier in chapter 3). To solve this problem, non-blocking sockets were introduced.

2. Non-blocking mode A socket can be set into non-blocking mode using ioctlsocket (with FIONBIO as its cmd

parameter). Some functions used in I/O models implicitly set the socket in non-blocking mode

(more on this later). When a socket is in non-blocking mode, winsock functions that operate on

it will never block but always return immediately, possibly failing because there simply wasn't

5. I/O models


any time to perform the operation. Non-blocking sockets introduce a new winsock error code

which - unlike other errors - is not exceptional. For now, keep the following in mind:

WSAEWOULDBLOCK

This constant is the error code a winsock function sets when it cannot immediately perform an operation

on a non-blocking socket. You get this error code when you call WSAGetLastError after a winsock

function failed. Its name literally says 'error, would block', meaning that the function would have to block

to complete. Since a non-blocking socket should not block, the function can never do what you ask it to.

Note that this isn't really an error. It can occur all the time when using non-blocking sockets. It just says:

I can't do that right now, try again later. The I/O model usually provides a way to determine what's the

best time to try again.

3. I/O models

I've made several attempts to find a categorical description of the several I/O models but I

haven't really found a good one, mainly because the models' properties overlap and terms like

(a)synchronous have slightly different meanings or apply to different things for each model. So

I decided to just create a table with all the models to show the differences and explain the

details later.

Model Blocking mode

Notification method

none on network event

on completion

Blocking sockets blocking x

Polling non-blocking x

Select both

blocking select

WSAAsyncSelect non-blocking

window message

WSAEventSelect non-blocking

event objects

Overlapped I/O: blocking N/A

blocking call

Overlapped I/O: polling N/A x

Overlapped I/O: completion routines

N/A

callback function

Overlapped I/O: completion ports N/A

completion port

The first five models are commonly used and fairly easy to use. The last four actually use the

same model (overlapped I/O), but use different implementation methods. Actually, you don't

really need overlapped I/O unless you're writing network programs that should be able to

3. I/O models

[40]

handle thousands of connections. Most people won't write such programs but I included them

because good information and tutorials about the overlapped I/O model is not easy to find on

the web. If you're not interested in overlapped I/O you can safely skip the future chapters

about them.

One way to divide the I/O models is based on the blocking mode it uses. The blocking sockets

model naturally uses blocking mode, while the others use non-blocking mode (select may be

used for both). The blocking mode is not applicable to overlapped I/O because these operations

always operate asynchronously (the blocking mode cannot affect this nor the other way

around).

Another way to divide them is using their differences in the notification method used (if any).

There are three subtypes:

None

There is no notification of anything, an operation simply fails or succeeds (optionally

blocking).

On network event

A notification is sent on a specific network event (data available, ready to send,

incoming connection waiting to be accepted, etc.). Operations fail if they cannot

complete immediately, the network event notification can be used to determine the

best time to try again.

On completion

A notification is sent when a pending network operation has been completed.

Operations either succeed immediately, or fail with an 'I/O pending' error code

(assuming nothing else went wrong). You will be notified when the operation does

complete, eliminating the need to try the operation again.

Blocking mode doesn't use any notifications, the call will just block until the operation finished.

WSAAsyncSelect is an example of a network event notification model as you will be notified by

a window message when a specific network event occurred. The completion notification

method is solely used by overlapped I/O, and is far more efficient. They are bound directly to

the operations; the big difference between the network event and completion notification is that

a completion notification will be about a specific operation you requested, while a network

5. I/O models


event can happen because of any reason. Also, overlapped I/O operations can - like its name

says - overlap. That means multiple I/O requests can be queued.

In the next section I will show you the details of each model separately. To give you a more

intuitive view of the models, I've created timeline images and used a conversation between the

program and winsock as an analogy to how the model works.

Note

In many of these timelines I've assumed the winsock operation fails (in a

WSAEWOULDBLOCK way) because that is the interesting case. The function might as well

succeed and return immediately if the operation has been done already. I've left this

case out in most of the timelines in favor of clarity.

4. Blocking sockets Blocking sockets are the easiest to use, they were already used in the first socket

implementations. When an operation performed on a blocking socket cannot complete

immediately, the socket will block (ie. halt execution) until it is completed. This implies that

when you call a winsock function like send or recv, it might take quite a while (compared to

other API calls) before it returns.

This is the timeline for a blocking socket:

As you can see, as soon as the main thread calls a winsock function that couldn't be completed

immediately, the function will not return until it is completed. Naturally this keeps the program

flow simple, since the operations can be sequenced easily.

5. Polling

[42]

By default, a socket is in blocking mode and behaves as shown above. As I told earlier, I will

also show each I/O model in the form of a conversation between the program and winsock. For

blocking sockets, it's very simple:

program: send this data

winsock: okay, but it might take some time

...

...

...

done!

5. Polling

Polling is actually a very bad I/O model in windows, but for completeness' sake of I will

describe it. Polling is an I/O model for non-blocking sockets, so the socket first has to be put

into non-blocking mode. This can be done with ioctlsocket. Polling in general is repeating

something until its status is the desired one, in this case repeating a winsock function until it

returns successfully:

Because the socket is non-blocking, the function will not block until the operation is finished. If

it cannot perform the operation it has to fail (with WSAEWOULDBLOCK as error code). The

polling I/O model just keeps calling the function in a loop until it succeeds:


5. I/O models


winsock: sorry can't do that right now, I would block








winsock: done!

As I said, this is a really bad method because its effect is the same as a blocking function, except

that you have some control inside the loop so you could stop waiting when some variable is set,

for example. This style of synchronization is called 'busy waiting', which means the program is

continuously busy with waiting, wasting precious CPU time. Blocking sockets are far more

efficient since they use an efficient wait state that requires nearly no CPU time until the

operation completes.

Now you know how the polling I/O model works, forget about it immediately and avoid it by

all means :)

6. Select Select provides you a more controlled way of blocking. Although it can be used on blocking

sockets too, I will only focus on the non-blocking socket usage. This is the timeline for select:

6. Select

[44]

And the corresponding conversation:



program: okay, tell me when's the best time to try again (the select call)

winsock: sure, hang on a minute

...

...

try again now!


winsock: done!

You might have noticed that the select call looks suspiciously similar to the blocking socket

timeline. This is because the select function does block. The first call tries to perform the

winsock operation. In this case, the operation would block but the function can't so it returns.

Then at one point, select is called. Select will wait until the best time to retry the winsock

operation. So instead of blocking winsock functions, we now have only one function that blocks,

select.

If select blocks, why use it for non-blocking sockets then? Select is more powerful than blocking

sockets because it can wait on multiple events. This is the prototype of select:

5. I/O models


select PROTO nfds:DWORD, readfds:DWORD, writefds:DWORD, exceptfds:DWORD,

timeout:DWORD

Select determines the status of one or more sockets, performing synchronous I/O if necessary.

The nfds parameter is ignored, select is one of the original Berkeley sockets functions, it is

provided for compatibility. The timeout parameter can be used to specify an optional timeout

for the function. The other three parameters all specify a set of sockets.

readfds is a set of sockets that will be checked for readability

writefds is a set of sockets that will be checked for writability

exceptfds is a set of sockets that will be checked for errors

Readability means that data has arrived on a socket and that a call to read after select is likely to

receive data. Writability means it's a good time to send data since the receiver is probably ready

to receive it. Exceptfds is used to catch errors from a non-blocking connect call as well as out-of-

band data (which is not discussed in this tutorial).

So while select may block you have more control over it since you can specify more than one

socket to wait on for a specific event, and multiple types of events (data waiting, ready to send

or some error that has occurred). Select will be explained more detailed in later chapters.

7. Windows messages (WSAASyncSelect) Many windows programs have some kind of window to get input from and give information to

the user. Winsock provides a way to integrate the network event notification with a windows's

message handling. The WSAAsyncSelect function will register notification for the specified

network events in the form of a custom window message.

WSAAsyncSelect PROTO s:DWORD, hWnd:DWORD, wMsg:DWORD, lEvent:DWORD

This function requires a custom message (wMsg) that the user chooses and the window

procedure should handle. lEvent is a bit mask that selects the events to be notified about. The

timeline is as follows:

7. Windows messages (WSAASyncSelect)

[46]

Let's say the first message wants to write some data to the socket using send. Because the socket

is non-blocking, send will return immediately. The call might succeed immediately, but here it

didn't (it would need to block). Assuming WSAAsyncSelect was setup to notify you about the

FD_WRITE event, you will eventually get a message from winsock telling you a network event

has happened. In this case it's the FD_WRITE event which means something like: "I'm ready

again, try resending your data now". So in the handler of that message, the program tries to

send the data again, and this is likely to succeed.

The conversation between the program and winsock is much like the one with select, the

difference is in the method of notification: a window message instead of a synchronous select

call. While select blocks waiting until an event happens, a program using WSAASyncSelect can

continue to process windows messages as long as no events happen.

program registers for network event notification via window messages



program handles some message

program handles some other message

program gets a notification window message from winsock

5. I/O models



winsock: done!

WSAAsyncSelect provide a more 'Windows natural' way of event notification and is fairly easy

to use. For low traffic servers (ie. < 1000 connections) it efficient enough as well. The drawback

is that window messages aren't really fast and that you'll need a window in order to use it.

8. Event objects (WSAEventSelect) WSAAsyncSelect brother is WSAEventSelect, which works in a very similar way but uses event

objects instead of windows messages. This has some advantages, including a better separation

of the network code and normal program flow and better efficiency (event objects work faster

than window messages).

Have a good look at the timeline and conversation, it looks a bit complicated but it really isn't:

program registers for network event notification via event objects



program waits for the event object to signal

9. Use with threads

[48]


winsock: done!

It's hard to draw a timeline for this function since event objects are a very powerful mechanism

that can be used in many ways. I chose for a simple example here as this I/O model will be

explained in great detail later in this tutorial.

At first, this model seems a lot like blocking: you wait for an event object to be signaled. This is

true, but you can also wait for multiple events at the same time and create your own event

objects. Event objects are part of the windows API, winsock uses the same objects. Winsock

does have special functions to create the event objects but they are just wrappers around the

usual functions.

All that winsock does with this model is signaling an event object when a winsock event

happens. How you use this notification method is up to you. That makes it a very flexible

model.

The function used to register for network events is WSAEventSelect. It is much like

WSAAsyncSelect:

WSAEventSelect PROTO s:DWORD, hEventObject:DWORD, lNetworkEvents:DWORD

WSAAsyncSelect will send you a custom message with the network event that happened

(FD_READ, FD_WRITE, etc.). Unlike WSAAsyncSelect, WSAEventSelect has only one way of

notification: signaling the event object. When the object is signaled, one or more events may

have happened. Which events exactly can be found out with WSAEnumNetworkEvents.

9. Use with threads Before starting with the overlapped I/O models I first want to explain some things about the

use of threads. Some of the models explained can show different behavior when threads come

into play. For example, blocking sockets in a single threaded application will block the whole

application. But when the blocking sockets are used in a separate thread, the main thread

continues to run while the helper thread blocks. For low traffic servers (let's say 10 connections

or so), an easy to implement method is to use the select model with one thread per client. Each

running thread is bound to a specific connection, handling requests and responses for that

5. I/O models


particular connection. Other ways of using threads are possible too, like handling multiple

connections per thread to limit the number of threads (this is useful for servers with many

connections), or just one main thread to handle the user input/GUI and one worker thread that

deals with all the socket I/O.

The same thing holds for the other models, although some combine better with threads than

others. For example, WSAAsyncSelect uses window messages. You could use threads but you

somehow have to pass the received messages to the worker threads. Easier to use is

WSAEventSelect, since threads can wait on events (even multiple) so notifications can be

directly acted on in the thread. Pure blocking sockets can be used as well, but it's hard to get

some control over a thread that is blocked on a winsock function (select has the same problem).

With events, you can create a custom event (not winsock related) and use that to notify the

thread about something that hasn't got to do with socket I/O like shutting down the server.

As you can see, threads can be very powerful and change the abilities of an I/O model

radically. Many servers need to handle multiple requests at the same time so that's why threads

are a logical choice to implement this; threads all run at the same time. In later chapters I will

discuss the use of threads, for now it's enough to know you can use them.

10. Introduction to Overlapped I/O Overlapped I/O is very efficient and when implemented well also very scalable (allowing

many, many connections to be handled). This is especially true for overlapped I/O in

combination with completion ports. I said before that for most uses overlapped I/O is a bit

overkill but I will explain them anyway.

The asynchronous models discussed so far all send some kind of notification on the occurrence

of a network event like 'data available' or 'ready to send again'. The overlapped I/O models also

notify you, but about completion instead of a network event. When requesting a winsock

operation, it might either complete immediately or fail with WSA_IO_PENDING as the winsock

error code. In the latter case, you will be notified when the operation is finished. This means

you don't have to try again like with the other models, you just wait until you're told it's done.

The price to pay for this efficient model is that overlapped I/O is a bit tricky to implement.

Usually one of the other models can stand up to the task as well, prefer those if you don't need

11. Overlapped I/O: blocking on event

[50]

really high performance and scalability. Also, the windows 9x/ME series do not fully support

all overlapped I/O models. While NT4/2K/XP has full kernel support for overlapped I/O,

win9x/ME has none. However for some devices (including sockets), overlapped I/O is

emulated by the windows API in win9x/ME. This means you can use overlapped I/O with

winsock for win9x/ME, but NT+ has a much greater support for it and provides more

functionality. For example, I/O completion ports are not available at all on win9x systems.

Besides, if you're writing high-performance applications that require overlapped I/O I strongly

recommend running it on an NT+ system.

As with the network event notification models, overlapped I/O can be implemented in different

ways too. They differ in the method of notification: blocking, polling, completion routines and

completion ports.

11. Overlapped I/O: blocking on event The first overlapped I/O model I'm going to explain is using an event object to signal

completion. This is much like WSAEventSelect, except that the object is set into the signaled

state on completion of an operation, not on some network event. Here's the timeline:

As with WSAEventSelect, there are many ways to use the event object. You could just wait for

it, you could wait for multiple objects, etc. In the timeline above a blocking wait is used,

matching this simple conversation:

5. I/O models



winsock: okay, but I couldn't send it right now

program waits for the event object to signal, indicating completion of the

operation

As you can see, the winsock operation is actually performed at the same time as the main thread

is running (or waiting in this case). When the event is signaled, the operation is complete and

the main thread can perform the next I/O operation. With network event notification models,

you probably had to retry the operation. This is not necessary here.

12. Overlapped I/O: polling Just like the polling model mentioned earlier, the status of an overlapped I/O operation can be

polled too. The WSAGetOverlappedResult function can be used to determine the status of a

pending operation. The timeline and conversation are pretty much the same as the other polling

model, except for that the operation happens at the same time as the polling, and that the status

is the completion of the operation, not whether the operation succeeded immediately or would

have blocked.



13. Overlapped I/O: completion routines

[52]

program: are you done yet?

winsock: no


winsock: no


winsock: no


winsock: no


winsock: yes!

Again, polling isn't very good as it puts too much stress on the CPU. Continuously asking if an

operation completes is less efficient than just waiting for it in an efficient, little CPU consuming

wait state. So I don't consider this a very good I/O model either. This doesn't render

WSAGetOverlappedResult useless though, it has more uses, which I will show when the

tutorial comes to the chapters about overlapped I/O.

13. Overlapped I/O: completion routines Completion routines are callback routines that get called when an operation (which you

associated with the routine) completes. This looks quite simple but there is a tricky part: the

callback routine is called in the context of the thread that initiated the operation. What does that

mean? Imagine a thread just asked for an overlapped write operation. Winsock will perform

this operation while your main thread continues to run. So winsock has its own thread for the

operation. When the operation finishes, winsock will have to call the callback routine. If it

would just call it, the routine would be run in the context of the winsock thread. This means the

calling thread (the thread that asked for the operation) would be running at the same time as

the callback routine. The problem with that is that you don't have synchronization with the

calling thread, it doesn't know the operation completed unless the callback tells him somehow.

5. I/O models


To prevent this from happening, winsock makes sure the callback is run in the context of the

calling thread by using the APC (Asynchronous Procedure Call) mechanism included in

windows. You can look at this as 'injecting' a routine into a threads program flow so it will run

the routine and then continue with what it was doing. Of course the system can't just say to a

thread: "Stop doing whatever you were doing, and run this routine first!". A thread can't just be

intervened at any point.

In order to deal with this, the APC mechanism requires the thread to be in a so-called alertable

wait state. Each thread has its own APC queue where APCs are waiting to be called. When the

thread enters an alertable wait state it indicates that it's willing to run an APC. The function that

put the thread in this wait state (for example SleepEx, WaitForMultipleObjectsEx and more)

either returns on the normal events for that function (timeout, triggered event etc.) or when an

APC was executed.

Overlapped I/O with completion routines use the APC mechanism (though slightly wrapped)

to notify you about completion of an operation. The timeline and conversation are:



program enters an alertable wait state

14. Overlapped I/O: completion ports

[54]

the operation completes

winsock: system, queue this completion routine for that thread

the wait state the program is in is alerted

the wait function executes the queued completion routine and returns to the

program

APCs can be a bit hard to understand but don't worry, this is just an introduction. Usually a

thread is in the alertable wait state until the callback is called, which handles the event and

returns to the thread. The thread then does some operations if necessary and finally loops back

to the wait state again.

14. Overlapped I/O: completion ports We've finally come to the last and probably most efficient winsock I/O model: overlapped I/O

with completion ports. A completion port is a mechanism available in NT kernels (win9x/ME

has no support for it) to allow efficient management of threads. Unlike the other models

discussed so far, completion ports have their own thread management. I didn't draw a timeline

nor made a conversation for this model, as it probably wouldn't make things clearer. I did draw

an image of the mechanism itself, have a good look at it first:

The idea behind completion ports is the following. After creating the completion port, multiple

sockets (or files) can be associated with it. At that point, when an overlapped I/O operation

completes, a completion packet is sent to the completion port. The completion port has a pool of

similar worker threads, each of which are blocking on the completion port. On arrival of a

completion packet, the port takes one of the inactive queued threads and activates it. The

activated thread handles the completion event and then blocks again on the port.

5. I/O models


The management of threads is done by the completion port. There are a certain number of

threads running (waiting on the completion port actually), but usually not all of them are active

at the same time. When creating the completion port you can specify how many threads are

active at the same time. This value defaults to the number of CPUs in the system.

Completion ports are a bit counter intuitive. There is no relation between a thread and a

connection or operation. Each thread has to be able to act on any completion event that

happened on the completion port. I/O completion ports (IOCP) are not easy to implement but

provide a very good scalability. You will be able to handle thousands of connections with IOCP.

15. Conclusion I hope you now have a global view of all the I/O models available. Don't worry if you don't

fully understand them, the next chapters will explain them more detailed, one at a time.

▌▌▌▌

1. A simple client

[56]

6. Blocking sockets: client

The first I/O model I'm going to explain to you is the simplest one, the blocking sockets.

Winsock functions operating on blocking sockets will not return until the requested operation

has completed or an error has occurred. This behavior allows a pretty linear program flow so

it's easy to use them. In chapter 4, you've seen the basic winsock functions. These are pretty

much all functions you need to program blocking sockets, although I will show you some

additional functions that may be useful in this chapter.

You might not be very interested in blocking sockets if you plan to use an I/O model that uses

non-blocking socket. Nonetheless, I strongly recommend you to read the chapters about

blocking sockets too since they cover the socket programming basics and other useful winsock

features I will assume you remember for the next chapters.

1. A simple client The first example is a simple client program that connects to a website and makes a request. It

will be a console application as they work well with blocking sockets. I won't assume you have

deep knowledge of the HTTP (the protocol used for the web), this is what happens in short:

The client connects to the server (on port 80 by default)

The server accepts the connection and just waits

The clients sends its HTTP request as an HTTP request message

The server responds to the HTTP request with an HTTP response message

The server closes the connection*

*) This depends on the value of the connection HTTP header, but to keep things simple, we

assume the connection will always be closed.

HTTP follows the typical client-server model, the client and server talk to each other in turns.

The client initiates the requests; the server reacts with a response.

An HTTP request includes a request method of which the three most used are GET and POST

and HEAD. GET is used to get a resource from the web (webpage, image, etc.). POST sends



data to the server first (like form data filled by the user), then receives the server's response.

Finally, HEAD is the same as GET, except for that the actual data is not send by the server, only

the HTTP response message. HEAD is used as a fast way to see if a page has been modified

without having to download the full page data. In the example program I will use HEAD since

GET can return quite some data while HEAD will only return a response code and set of

headers so the program's output easier to read.

A typical HTTP request with the HEAD request method looks like this:

HEAD / HTTP/1.1 <crlf>

Host: www.google.com <crlf>

User-agent: HeadReqSample <crlf>

Connection: close <crlf>

<crlf>

The first / in the fist line is the requested page, in this case the server's root (default page).

HTTP/1.1 indicates version 1.1 of the HTTP protocol is used. After this first special line that

contains the command follows a set of header in the form "header-name: value", terminated by

a blank line. As line terminators, a combination of carriage return (CR, 0x0D) and line feed (LF,

0x0A) is used. That last blank line indicates the end of the client's request. As soon as the server

detects this, it will send back a response in this form:

HTTP/1.1 Response-code Response-message <crlf>

header-name: value <crlf>



<crlf>

As you can see the response format is much like that of a request. Response-code is a 3-digit

code that indicates the success or failure of the request. Typical response codes are 200

(everything OK), 404 (page not found, you probably knew this one :) and 302 (found but located

elsewhere, redirect). Response-message is a human-readable version of the response code and

can be anything the server likes. The set of headers include information about the requested

2. Program example

[58]

resource. A HEAD request will result in the above response. If the request method would have

been GET, the actual page data will be sent back by the server after this response message.

So far for the crash course HTTP, it's not really necessary to understand it all to read the

examples about blocking sockets, but now you have some background information too. If you

want to read more about HTTP, find the RFC for it (www.rfc-editor.org) or google for HTTP.

Another great introduction to HTTP is HTTP made really easy.

2. Program example

A possible output of the example program called HeadReq is shown here:

X:\>headreq www.microsoft.com

Initializing winsock... initialized.

Looking up hostname www.microsoft.com... found.

Creating socket... created.

Attempting to connect to 207.46.134.190:80... connected.

Sending request... request sent.

Dumping received data...

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

Connection: close

Date: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 20:14:03 GMT

Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0

P3P: CP='ALL IND DSP COR ADM CONo CUR CUSo IVAo IVDo PSA PSD TAI TELo

OUR SAMo C

NT COM INT NAV ONL PHY PRE PUR UNI'

Content-Length: 31102

Content-Type: text/html

Expires: Mon, 17 Mar 2003 20:14:03 GMT

Cache-control: private

Cleaning up winsock... done.

If the program's parameter (www.microsoft.com) is omitted, www.google.com is used.

http://www.rfc-editor.org/

http://www.jmarshall.com/easy/http/



3. Hostnames So what do we need for the client? I'm assuming you have the address of the webpage

(www.google.com for example) and you want to get the default webpage for it, like the page

you get when entering www.google.com in your web browser (in order to keep things simple

we will only receive the server's response headers, not the actual page).

As you know from chapter 4, you can connect a socket to a server with the connect function, but

this function requires a sockaddr structure (or sockaddr_in in the case of TCP/IP). How do we

build up this structure? Sockaddr_in needs an address family, an IP number and a port number.

The address family is simply AF_INET. The port number is also easy; the default for the HTTP

protocol is port 80. What about the IP, we only got a hostname? If you remember chapter 2

there's a DNS server that knows which IPs correspond to which hostnames. To find this out,

winsock has a function called gethostbyname:

hostent * gethostbyname(const char *name);

You simply provide this function a hostname as a string (eg. "www.google.com") and it will

return a pointer to a hostent structure. This hostent structure contains a list of addresses (IPs)

that are valid for the given hostname. One of these IPs can then be put into the sockaddr_in

structure and we're done.

4. Framework The program we're going to write will connect to a web server, send a HEAD HTTP request and

dump all output. An optional parameter specifies the server name to connect to, if no name is

given it defaults to www.google.com.

First of all, we define the framework for the application:

#include <iostream>

#define WIN32_MEAN_AND_LEAN

#include <winsock2.h>

#include <windows.h>

using namespace std;

class HRException

{

5. Constants and global data

[60]

public:

HRException() :

m_pMessage("") {}

virtual ~HRException() {}

HRException(const char *pMessage) :

m_pMessage(pMessage) {}

const char * what() { return m_pMessage; }

private:

const char *m_pMessage;

};

int main(int argc, char* argv[])

{

// main program

}

The winsock headers are already included by windows.h, but because we use some winsock 2

specific things we also need to include winsock2.h. Include this file before windows.h to

prevent it from including an older winsock version first. We will also need the STL's iostream

classes, so we included those too. Don't forget to link to ws2_32.lib, or you'll get a bunch of

unresolved symbol errors.

The HRException class is a simple exception class used to throw errors that occur. One of its

constructors takes a const char * with an error message that can be retrieved with the what()

method.

5. Constants and global data The program will need some constants and global data, which we define in the following code

snippet:

const int REQ_WINSOCK_VER = 2; // Minimum winsock version required

const char DEF_SERVER_NAME[] = "www.google.com";

const int SERVER_PORT = 80;

const int TEMP_BUFFER_SIZE = 128;

const char HEAD_REQUEST_PART1[] =

{

"HEAD / HTTP/1.1\r\n" // Get root index from server

"Host: " // Specify host name used

};

const char HEAD_REQUEST_PART2[] =

{

"\r\n" // End hostname header from part1

"User-agent: HeadReqSample\r\n" // Specify user agent

"Connection: close\r\n" // Close connection after response

"\r\n" // Empty line indicating end of request



};

// IP number typedef for IPv4

typedef unsigned long IPNumber;

These constants and data define the default hostname (www.google.com), server port (80 for

HTTP), receive buffer size, and the minimum (major) winsock version required (2 or higher in

our case). Furthermore, the full HTTP request is put in two variables. The request is split up

because the hostname of the server needs to be inserted as the host header (see the HTTP

message examples above). While all strings in C automatically get a 0 byte at the end to

terminate it, we don't actually treat it as a null-terminated string. Only the text itself will be

send, without the null terminator. Finally, unsigned long is typedef'ed to IPNumber to make the

code a bit clearer.

6. The main function The first thing to do is initializing winsock. We will do this in the main function and write the

actual code for the HTTP request in a different function named RequestHeaders. The main

function is:


{

int iRet = 1;

WSADATA wsaData;

cout << "Initializing winsock... ";

if (WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(REQ_WINSOCK_VER,0), &wsaData)==0)

{

// Check if major version is at least REQ_WINSOCK_VER

if (LOBYTE(wsaData.wVersion) >= REQ_WINSOCK_VER)

{

cout << "initialized.\n";

// Set default hostname:

const char *pHostname = DEF_SERVER_NAME;

// Set custom hostname if given on the commandline:

if (argc > 1)

pHostname = argv[1];

iRet = !RequestHeaders(pHostname);

}

else

{

cerr << "required version not supported!";

}

7. RequestHeaders

[62]

cout << "Cleaning up winsock... ";

// Cleanup winsock


{

cerr << "cleanup failed!\n";

iRet = 1;

}

cout << "done.\n";

}

else

{

cerr << "startup failed!\n";

}

return iRet;

}

The value the main function returns will be given back as exit code to the OS. Since the

convention for command line program is that an exit code of 0 indicates success while other

values indicate some kind of error, we will follow this and return the correct value depending

on the success of the winsock initialization and the RequestHeaders function.

First of all, WSAStartup is called. It wants the highest winsock version your program supports

(REQ_WINSOCK_VER) and fills in a WSADATA structure. After we check if this function

succeeded, we still need to check which winsock version has been loaded, since this might be

less than REQ_WINSOCK_VER (see chapter 4). If the major version number is at least

REQ_WINSOCK_VER, we got the right version.

Then, argc is checked to see if a parameter was given to the program. If there was, it should be a

hostname and instead of the default hostname, the parameter comes from argv and is passed on

to RequestHeaders.

If WSAStartup succeeded, a matching call to WSACleanup is needed. This is done at the end of

the code.

7. RequestHeaders RequestHeaders is the function where all the magic happens. The basic structure of it is:

bool RequestHeaders(const char *pServername)

{

SOCKET hSocket = INVALID_SOCKET;

char tempBuffer[TEMP_BUFFER_SIZE];

sockaddr_in sockAddr = {0};



bool bSuccess = true;

try

{

// code goes here

}

catch(HRException e)

{

cerr << "\nError: " << e.what() << endl;

bSuccess = false;

}

return bSuccess;

}

As a parameter, RequestHeaders gets the name of the server to connect to. There are some

variables we will use, the socket handle, a temporary buffer used to store received data and a

sockaddr_in structure for the server's address. The socket handle is initialized to

INVALID_SOCKET, the only value that can't be used as a socket handle. bSuccess is a bool that

is set to false if the function fails. The main code is surrounded by a try-catch block, any error

that occurs is thrown as a standard STL exception and caught by this function. The cleanup

code will be after the try-catch block, so cleaning up happens both when everything succeeds

and on failure.

The RequestHeaders function has the following tasks:

Resolve the hostname to its IP.

Create a socket.

Connect the socket to the remote host.

Send the HTTP request data.

Receive data and print it until the other side closes the connection.

Cleanup

I will show you how to implement each step in the next sections.

8. Resolving the hostname to its IP To connect to the server, we need to fill a sockaddr_in structure with its address. As I said

earlier, this structure consists of an address family (always AF_INET), an IP number and a port

number. Although the port number is not always 80 for web servers, we will assume it is. I also

8. Resolving the hostname to its IP

[64]

explained gethostbyname can be used to lookup a hostname at the DNS server and retrieve its

IP number. The next function of our program, FindHostIP, uses this winsock function.

Note that looking up a host involves a request to a DNS server so it might take some time

(typically only 10 milliseconds or so but that's slow compared to normal code). If the hostname

isn't found, it might even take seconds. Because we are using blocking sockets, the program will

simply hang on gethostbyname until it either succeeds or fails. While gethostbyname is

running, we have no control over our program. But as the program is a console program, this

doesn't matter.

IPNumber FindHostIP(const char *pServerName)

{

HOSTENT *pHostent;

// Get hostent structure for hostname:

if (!(pHostent = gethostbyname(pServerName)))

throw HRException("could not resolve hostname.");

// Extract primary IP address from hostent structure:

if (pHostent->h_addr_list && pHostent->h_addr_list[0])

return *reinterpret_cast<IPNumber*>(pHostent->h_addr_list[0]);

return 0;

}

Gethostbyname takes a hostname as its single parameter and returns a pointer to a hostent

structure. Note that it cannot handle hostnames that are IPs in string form (like

"101.102.103.104"). Therefore our program does not accept an IP number as server name in the

first parameter. If you would want to allow this, the string can be converted into a number with

the inet_addr function.

If the function fails it returns NULL, which is the first thing we check. It means the server name

could not be resolved. If it did succeed, we now have a hostent structure pointer. This allocated

memory doesn't need to be freed; winsock has a piece of memory for each thread specifically for

storing this data in. However this does imply that on the next call to gethostbyname, you cannot

use the hostent structure returned by a previous call to it, since it would have been overwritten.

The hostent structure can contain a list of addresses, which do not necessarily have to be IP

numbers. Since we use TCP/IP, they will be IP numbers but the structure still has to support

other forms of addresses. The h_addr_list member of hostent points to a null-terminated array



of other pointers. Each pointer points in that array points to an address. Since the hostent

structure does not know the type of addresses used, you need to cast the pointers to the right

type, in this case IPNumber*. The FindHostIP code extracts the first available IP address from

this structure and returns it. Some additional pointer checks ensure that the program doesn't

crash if the pointers are not set or arrays are empty.

The return value of this function, the IP number in network byte order, is used by FillSockAddr:

void FillSockAddr(sockaddr_in *pSockAddr, const char *pServerName, int portNumber)

{

// Set family, port and find IP

pSockAddr->sin_family = AF_INET;

pSockAddr->sin_port = htons(portNumber);

pSockAddr->sin_addr.S_un.S_addr = FindHostIP(pServerName);

}

All it does is calling FindHostIP and storing the IP in the sockaddr_in structure pointed to by

the pSockAddr parameter. It also converts the port number from the portNumber parameter to

network byte order and stores it as well.

Back to the RequestHeaders function we call FillSockAddr to fill in our local sockaddr_in

structure with the right information:

// Lookup hostname and fill sockaddr_in structure:

cout << "Looking up hostname " << pServername << "... ";

FillSockAddr(&sockAddr, pServername, SERVER_PORT);

cout << "found.\n";

9. Creating a socket

The next step is to create a socket to connect with. This is quite simple, just call socket with the

right parameters:

// Create socket

cout << "Creating socket... ";

if ((hSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP)) == INVALID_SOCKET)

throw HRException("could not create socket.");

cout << "created.\n";

If socket fails, it returns INVALID_SOCKET. In that case, no further operations are performed

and the following cleanup code (after the catch() handler) is executed directly:

if (hSocket!=INVALID_SOCKET)


10. Connecting the socket

[66]

The cleanup code is always executed, whether an error occurred or not. It first checks if the

socket handle wasn't INVALID_SOCKET (no socket was created). If it isn't, the socket handle is

valid and needs to be closed.

10. Connecting the socket Now that we have the socket, we can connect it to a remote host with connect. Connect uses the

sockaddr_in structure we've setup earlier with FillSockAddr and attempts to connect the given

socket with the addressed host. Here too, connect will block until a connection has been

established or something went wrong. The return value of connect is zero if the socket is

connected, otherwise it's SOCKET_ERROR. Before actually connecting, a message is print with

the IP and port number of the remote host. The inet_ntoa function is used to convert the

numeric IP into a string with the IP in dotted format.

// Connect to server

cout << "Attempting to connect to " << inet_ntoa(sockAddr.sin_addr)

<< ":" << SERVER_PORT << "... ";

if (connect(hSocket, reinterpret_cast<sockaddr*>(&sockAddr), sizeof(sockAddr))!=0)

throw HRException("could not connect.");

cout << "connected.\n";

11. Sending the request

When the socket is connected the HTTP request can be send. It is sent in three parts, to easily

insert the hostname inside the request:

HEAD / HTTP/1.1 <crlf>

Host: www.google.com <crlf>

User-agent: HeadReqSample <crlf>

Connection: close <crlf>

< crlf>

The send calls are pretty straightforward, each call takes a buffer and sends the specified

amount of bytes from it to the remote host. Send will block until all the data has been sent, or

fail and return SOCKET_ERROR.

cout << "Sending request... ";

// send request part 1

if (send(hSocket, HEAD_REQUEST_PART1, sizeof(HEAD_REQUEST_PART1)-1, 0)==SOCKET_ERROR)



throw HRException("failed to send data.");

// send hostname

if (send(hSocket, pServername, lstrlen(pServername), 0)==SOCKET_ERROR)


// send request part 2

if (send(hSocket, HEAD_REQUEST_PART2, sizeof(HEAD_REQUEST_PART2)-1, 0)==SOCKET_ERROR)


cout << "request sent.\n";

Note that the buffer sizes specified are one less than sizeof(buffer), because we don't want to

send the null-terminator at the end of the string.

12. Receiving the response The final step of the program before cleaning up is to receive data and print it until the other

side closes the connection. The HTTP header "Connection: close" in our request tells the server

that it should close the connection after it has sent its response. Receiving data is done with the

recv function that receives the currently available data and puts it in a buffer. I kept the example

simple by choosing to just dump this output instead of actually doing something with it, so all

we have to do is keep calling recv until the connection is closed. Recv too will block if no data is

available immediately and return if some has arrived. The return value of recv is either 0,

SOCKET_ERROR or the number of bytes read. SOCKET_ERROR of course indicates a socket

error, 0 indicates closure of the connection. So basically we will loop until recv returns 0

(connection closed, done) or SOCKET_ERROR (something went wrong). This leads to the

following code:

cout << "Dumping received data...\n\n";

// Loop to print all data

while(true)

{

int retval;

retval = recv(hSocket, tempBuffer, sizeof(tempBuffer)-1, 0);

if (retval==0)

{

break; // Connection has been closed

}

else if (retval==SOCKET_ERROR)

{

throw HRException("socket error while receiving.");

}

else

{

13. Cleaning up

[68]

// retval is number of bytes read

// Terminate buffer with zero and print as string

tempBuffer[retval] = 0;

cout << tempBuffer;

}

}

Take a look at the call to recv. tempBuffer is the buffer that will receive the data. As the size of

the buffer, we specify its actual size minus one. This is because we will put a 0 byte after the last

byte received to transform the raw data into a null terminated string we can easily print. Note

that in general, it might be perfectly possible to have a 0 byte in the received data since TCP/IP

data is not restricted to text. You'll have to treat it as binary data. However, the HTTP protocol

does not allow 0 bytes in a HTTP response message (only text) so this won't happen. Even if it

would happen, the string would be printed wrong (the 0 byte would be wrongly seen as the

terminator) but it isn't likely to happen unless the HTTP server is bad (or the server is not a

HTTP server). What this comes down to is that this is just a quick and dirty way to print all the

received data that works find for correct HTTP HEAD responses. If you would actually do

something with the data more care needs to be taken (for example, a 0 byte in the received data

may not be seen as a terminator but indicates a bad HTTP server).

13. Cleaning up Finally, the socket is closed (if it was created) as shown earlier and the RequestHeaders function

will return true or false depending on the success of the function. Back in the main function,

winsock will be cleaned up (WSACleanup) and the program quits after printing a last message.

14. Finished! That's all, the program is finished.

Download the source zip file here: headreq_cpp.zip

http://www.madwizard.org/download/winsock/headreq_cpp.zip

The zip file contains the source files and the binary executable.

15. Conclusion As you can see, blocking sockets are quite easy to use. Their blocking property makes it possible

to code a very linear program, winsock operations just happen right where you ask for them.

This is different with non-blocking sockets, where you need synchronization because operations





do not always complete at once and you can't block. In the next chapter I will explain how to

write a simple server with blocking sockets, make sure you understand the client example well

as it uses the very basics of winsock.

▌▌▌▌

1. Program flow

[70]

7. Blocking sockets: server

Now that you've seen how a blocking client works, it's time for the blocking server example.

This chapter will explain how to build a simple server that ROT13 encodes the received data

and then sends it back. ROT13 (rot stands for rotate) is a very simple encryption method used

by Caesar. Each character in the alphabet is replaced by the character 13 positions farther (the

characters rotate 13 places). The encryption is symmetric, that is encryption works exactly the

same as decrypting. You can use rot13.com if you want to play with it.

1. Program flow

The program flow is as follows:

The server creates a server socket

The server socket is bound to an address

The server socket is put into the listening state

On connection attempt, the connection is accepted and a client socket is available

The client socket is read, every byte is ROT13'd and sent back.

When the client closes the connection, the program ends

2. Framework

The framework is almost the same as that of the blocking client example from chapter 6, only

the HRException has been renamed to ROTException and some include files were added:

#include <iostream>

#include <string>

#include <sstream>

#define WIN32_MEAN_AND_LEAN

#include <winsock2.h>

#include <windows.h>

using namespace std;

class ROTException

{

public:

ROTException() :

http://www.rot13.com/



m_pMessage("") {}

virtual ~ROTException() {}

ROTException(const char *pMessage) :

m_pMessage(pMessage) {}

const char * what() { return m_pMessage; }

private:

const char *m_pMessage;

};


{

// main program

}

3. Constants and global data

The program uses a few constants for the default server port number (4444), the required

winsock version and receive buffer size.

const int REQ_WINSOCK_VER = 2; // Minimum winsock version required

const int DEFAULT_PORT = 4444;

const int TEMP_BUFFER_SIZE = 128;

4. The main function

The main function too has a lot of common with the blocking client from the previous chapter:


{

int iRet = 1;

WSADATA wsaData;

cout << "Initializing winsock... ";

if (WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(REQ_WINSOCK_VER,0), &wsaData)==0)

{

// Check if major version is at least REQ_WINSOCK_VER

if (LOBYTE(wsaData.wVersion) >= REQ_WINSOCK_VER)

{

cout << "initialized.\n";

int port = DEFAULT_PORT;

if (argc > 1)

port = atoi(argv[1]);

iRet = !RunServer(port);

}

else

{

cerr << "required version not supported!";

}

cout << "Cleaning up winsock... ";

5. RunServer

[72]

// Cleanup winsock


{

cerr << "cleanup failed!\n";

iRet = 1;

}

cout << "done.\n";

}

else

{

cerr << "startup failed!\n";

}

return iRet;

}

Winsock is initialized, and cleaned up again when the program is finished. In between is the

server startup code. The program allows an optional parameter that specifies the port the server

should run on. If it is not set, the default port number is used (4444). Finally, RunServer is called

with the final port number as its parameter. The RunServer function contains the actual server

code.

5. RunServer RunServer is the function where the server is setup and connections are accepted. The basic

framework of this function is:

bool RunServer(int portNumber)

{

SOCKET hSocket = INVALID_SOCKET,

hClientSocket = INVALID_SOCKET;

bool bSuccess = true;

sockaddr_in sockAddr = {0};

try

{

// Create socket

cout << "Creating socket... ";

if ((hSocket = socket(AF_INET, SOCK_STREAM, IPPROTO_TCP)) == INVALID_SOCKET)

throw ROTException("could not create socket.");

cout << "created.\n";

// code goes here

}

catch(ROTException e)

{

cerr << "\nError: " << e.what() << endl;

bSuccess = false;

}



if (hSocket!=INVALID_SOCKET)


if (hClientSocket!=INVALID_SOCKET)

closesocket(hClientSocket);

return bSuccess;

}

A server socket is created in the usual way, and a variable to hold the client socket is reserved

too. The client socket doesn't have to be created, since winsock will do that for us later. You do

have to close both socket handles when you won't use them anymore though, this is done in the

cleanup part at the end of the code.

6. Binding the socket After the socket is created, we will bind it to an address. As I've explained in the first chapters, a

server listens on a specific port number and possibly on a specific IP number as well. Before you

can let the server socket listen, it must be bound. The winsock API bind will do that for you. In

this example, the socket will be bound to the port specified by the portNumber parameter of

RunServer, the IP number is set to INADDR_ANY, indicating that the server will listen on all

available IP numbers. To bind a socket with bind, you need to fill in a sockaddr_in structure

with the address you want the socket be bound to. Setting up this structure is done in a separate

function called SetServerSockAddr:

void SetServerSockAddr(sockaddr_in *pSockAddr, int portNumber)

{

// Set family, port and find IP

pSockAddr->sin_family = AF_INET;

pSockAddr->sin_port = htons(portNumber);

pSockAddr->sin_addr.S_un.S_addr = INADDR_ANY;

}

This function is called in RunServer in the following way:

// Bind socket

cout << "Binding socket... ";

SetServerSockAddr(&sockAddr, portNumber);

if (bind(hSocket, reinterpret_cast<sockaddr*>(&sockAddr), sizeof(sockAddr))!=0)

throw ROTException("could not bind socket.");

cout << "bound.\n";

7. Letting the socket listen

8. Accepting connections

[74]

If the binding succeeds, the socket is put into listening mode. As soon as it's in this state, any

client can make a connection attempt to the server on the port the socket is bound to. Setting the

listening mode is simply done by calling the listen winsock function:

// Put socket in listening mode

cout << "Putting socket in listening mode... ";

if (listen(hSocket, SOMAXCONN)!=0)

throw ROTException("could not put socket in listening mode.");

cout << "done.\n";

Listen has two parameters. The first is the socket you want to listen, the second is the length of

the queue of pending connections. Usually the default value of SOMAXCONN is okay for the

latter parameter. This value is the maximum number of connections that winsock will hold

pending until your program accepts them. You probably don't need to worry about this value

most of the time.

8. Accepting connections When the server socket is in the listening state, you need to accept the incoming connections

using the accept function. The accept function blocks until a connection request comes in,

establishes the connection and then returns a client socket handle. It is important to know that

the server socket's only purpose is now to listen for connections and accept them. As soon as

you accept a connection, a new socket is created by winsock. This socket is usually called the

client socket and that's the socket you will be receiving and sending data on. This often

confuses winsock beginners, some try to receive or send data on the listening socket, while they

should use the client socket.

Besides accepting a connection and returning a client socket handle, accept also fills in a

sockaddr_in structure with information about the client. Our example will use this information

to print a short description of the client that connected (in the form IP:port).

sockaddr_in clientSockAddr;

int clientSockSize = sizeof(clientSockAddr);

// Accept connection:

hClientSocket = accept(hSocket,

reinterpret_cast<sockaddr*>(&clientSockAddr),

&clientSockSize);

// Check if accept succeeded

if (hClientSocket==INVALID_SOCKET)

throw ROTException("accept function failed.");



cout << "accepted.\n";

// Wait for and accept a connection:

HandleConnection(hClientSocket, clientSockAddr);

The above code calls accept, and then handles the both the client socket handle and the

sockaddr_in structure to a new function, HandleConnection, which will deal with the

connection. After this code has executed, RunServer returns and closes the sockets, as shown

earlier.

9. HandleConnection The HandleConnection function handles the connection. The first thing it does is showing a

short description of the client. A separate function (GetHostDescription) is used to create this

description.

void HandleConnection(SOCKET hClientSocket, const sockaddr_in &sockAddr)

{

// Print description (IP:port) of connected client

cout << "Connected with " << GetHostDescription(sockAddr) << ".\n";

char tempBuffer[TEMP_BUFFER_SIZE];

// todo

cout << "Connection closed.\n";

}

The GetHostDescription function looks like this:

string GetHostDescription(const sockaddr_in &sockAddr)

{

ostringstream stream;

stream << inet_ntoa(sockAddr.sin_addr) << ":" << ntohs(sockAddr.sin_port);

return stream.str();

}

We will now write the part marked as 'todo' in the above HandleConnection framework. The

function should loop on recv until the connection is closed (recv returns 0). Every time data is

received, it is ROT13 encoded and sent back to the client. First of all, a simple function is written

to deal with the ROT13 encryption:

void rot13(char *pBuffer, int size)

{

for(int i=0;i<size;i++)

{

10. Testing

[76]

char c = pBuffer[i];

if ((c >= 'a' && c < 'n') || (c >= 'A' && c < 'N') )

c += 13;

else if ((c>='n' && c <= 'z') || (c>='N' && c <= 'Z'))

c -= 13;

else

continue;

pBuffer[i] = c;

}

}

Then the main loop is simple. First a recv call, that will receive data from the client. The rot13

function is called to encrypt the received data and finally send is used to send the encrypted

data back to the client:

// Read data

while(true)

{

int retval;

retval = recv(hClientSocket, tempBuffer, sizeof(tempBuffer), 0);

if (retval==0)

{

break; // Connection has been closed

}

else if (retval==SOCKET_ERROR)

{

throw ROTException("socket error while receiving.");

}

else

{

/* retval is the number of bytes received.

rot13 the data and send it back to the client */

rot13(tempBuffer, retval);

if (send(hClientSocket, tempBuffer, retval, 0)==SOCKET_ERROR)

throw ROTException("socket error while sending.");

}

}

10. Testing

That's all, it should work now. To test the program, you could use the telnet client supplied by

windows but you have to get the settings right. If you switch off the local echo you don't see

what you type but you do see what data you receive. This means you see the encrypted text

directly. However, I prefer a better client called PuTTY, you can find it here (search in googlr). I

recommend you to download it as well. Compile the program, run it and you will (hopefully)

see a message that the program is waiting for a connection:

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/

http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/



X:\asm\rot13server>rot13server

Initializing winsock... initialized.

Creating socket... created.

Binding socket... bound.

Putting socket in listening mode... done.

Fire up putty, and in the configuration screen, type in localhost as the hostname, 4444 as the

port number (or a different one if you choose to run the program with some other port). Set the

protocol to Raw. Finally press Open to connect.

You will now see putty's console window. Here you can type text that will be send to the server.

Any data received will be printed in the same window. Note: putty by default has local line

editing enabled. This means that you can type and even edit the text you type as long as you

stay on the same line, since it's not send until you press enter. If you use a client that

immediately sends every character, you also get a response immediately. If you have such a

client you should disable local echo (ie. showing the text you type), otherwise you get your text

and the received text interleaved, which is pretty hard to read. This is not the case with putty.

Here's a screenshot of the connection in action:

11. Source code

Finally, the source code:

Download the source zip file here: rot13server_cpp.zip

http://www.madwizard.org/download/winsock/rot13server_cpp.zip

12. Conclusion

[78]


12. Conclusion Now you've seen both a blocking client and a blocking server. Blocking sockets are relatively

easy to use because they fit in nicely in the program flow. Still, you've only seen pretty simple

examples, since both the client and the server we showed did practically nothing with the data

other than print it or in this case, encrypt and then send it back. It gets harder when we have to

extract meaningful information from the received data like when dealing with a protocol like

POP3.

▌▌▌▌

Questions 1) What do you mean by blocking I/O model? (nov-dec 2010, april-may 2009)

2) Is it possible that client written using TLI can communicate with server written using

Winsock API?- justify your answer (nov-dec 2009)

3) What is DLL? (nov-dec 2008)

4) Explain blocking socket and blocking function in detail? (nov-dec 2010, april-may2009)

5) What are the various time outs or blocking I/O operation? Explain in detail. (nov-dec

2010, april-may2009)

6) What are DLL issues? Why DLL issues are used? Explain. (nov-dec 2010, april-may2009)

7) Describe the basic steps for creating windows client- server socket application?

(nov-dec 2009)

8) What are the basic components of Winsock model? Explain the new DLL issues?

(nov-dec 2009)

9) What are the blocking socket and blocking function? Explain different timeouts

technique for blocking function? (nov-dec 2009)

10) What are operation modes in window sockets? Explain each in detail. (nov-dec 2008)

11) What is the advantage of using socket API? (nov-dec 2008)

12) Explain the blocking I/O model with respect to windows socket API? (nov-dec 2008)

▌▌▌▌


Index


Index

Index accept, 19, 34, 35, 36, 64, 74, 75

addr, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36, 64, 65, 66, 73, 75 Address Resolution Protocol. See ARP

addrlen, 35, 36 APCs. See Asynchronous Procedure Call API, 8, 17, 24, 25, 31, 41, 48, 50, 73 Application Programming Interface, 25 ARP, 11 Asynchronous Procedure Call, 53

backlog, 34 bcc, 7 Berkeley, 17, 23, 38, 45 big-endian, 30, 31 bind, 18, 19, 33, 34, 35, 73 blocking, 23, 24, 26, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43,

44, 45, 46, 48, 49, 50, 54, 56, 58, 64, 68, 70, 71, 78

Blocking sockets, 39, 41, 43, 56, 70, 78

buf, 36 byte ordering, 29, 30, 31 close, 11, 29, 57, 58, 60, 66, 67, 73 closesocket, 28, 29, 65, 73 connect, 16, 18, 19, 21, 22, 23, 32, 33, 45, 58,

59, 63, 65, 66, 77 datagram sockets, 17 DLLs, 24 DNS, 14, 25, 59, 64 Domain Name System. See DNS DWORD, 34, 45, 48 framework, 59, 70, 72, 75 gateway, 11 gcc, 7 gethostbyname, 59, 64 GUI, 49 hostent, 59, 64 HRException, 59, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, 67, 70 HTTP, 13, 15, 16, 17, 19, 20, 32, 56, 57, 58, 59,

60, 61, 63, 66, 67, 68 I/O model, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 48, 49, 50, 52,

54, 56 I/O models, 38, 39, 40, 50, 55

INADDR_ANY, 33, 34, 73 IOCP, 55 ioctlsocket, 38, 42 IP numbers, 11, 14, 64, 73 IP protocol, 11 LAN, 9, 11

len, 36 listen, 19, 34, 35, 73, 74 listening, 11, 15, 19, 21, 22, 23, 32, 34, 35, 70,

74, 77 loop back address, 18, 20

lpWSAData, 26, 27 MAC, 10, 11, 13 MAC number, 10, 11 msvc, 7

name, 32, 33, 39, 41, 57, 59, 60, 63, 64

namelen, 32, 33 nfds, 45 non-blocking, 24, 37, 38, 39, 40, 42, 43, 56, 68 overlapped I/O, 39, 40, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 54 Overlapped I/O, 39, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 packets, 10, 11, 12 Polling, 39, 42 port number, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20,

29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 36, 59, 63, 65, 66, 71, 72, 73, 77

protocol, 9, 11, 13, 14, 17, 19, 28, 30, 56, 57, 59, 68, 77, 78

recv, 36, 37, 41, 67, 68, 75, 76 RequestHeaders, 61, 62, 63, 65, 68 Select, 39, 43, 44, 45 send, 8, 10, 13, 17, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 42, 43,

44, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49, 51, 53, 57, 59, 61, 66, 67, 74, 76, 77, 78

Service Provider Interface, 25 sockaddr, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 59, 62, 63,

65, 66, 72, 73, 74, 75 socket, 8, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 28,

29, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42, 43, 44, 45, 46, 49, 56, 58, 59, 63, 65, 66, 67, 68, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77

SOCKET_ERROR, 29, 37, 66, 67, 76

Index

[80]

streaming sockets, 17 TCP, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 25, 28, 29, 30,

32, 33, 59, 64, 65, 68, 72 threads, 48, 49, 53, 54, 55 TTL, 11

type, 17, 28, 30, 33, 65, 76, 77 UDP, 11, 12, 17, 28 Unix, 17 update, 24 UTP cables, 9 Well Known Ports. See WKP wHighVersion, 27 win32asm, 7, 8 Windows, 17, 23, 24, 26, 31, 38, 45, 47 windows.h, 24, 59, 60, 70

WinSock API, 12 winsock API reference, 8 WKP, 11 WSAAsyncSelect, 39, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48, 49 WSADATA, 26, 27, 61, 62, 71 WSAEventSelect, 39, 47, 48, 49, 50

WSAEWOULDBLOCK, 39, 41, 42

WSAGetLastError, 27, 39 WSAGetOverlappedResult, 51, 52 WSAStartup, 26, 27, 61, 62, 71 wsock32, 24 wVersion, 27, 61, 71

wVersionRequested, 26, 27

▌▌▌▌

WinSock Programming Fundamental

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