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Hi all, We will try to briefly cover something called as IP Helper API's this week. These are a huge set of API's provided to manage the network and network entities on Windows based platforms. These API's provide a way to manage almost each and every entity on the Windows implementation of network stack.So there are API's to get information about network adapters, there are API's to manipulate routing tables, there are API's to manage ARP entries and for getting/setting all the MIB 2 (SNMP related thing) TCP/UDP statistics and much more.These API's are devided into many categories: 1. Adapter management - Manages the network adapters 2. ARP management - Manages the address resolution protocol entries 3. Interface management - Manages the different network interfaces 4. Address management - Manages network addresses and address entries 5. Network configuration - Manages configuration of different network parameters 6. Routing management - Manages the local routing table entries 7. MIB 2 TCP/UDP/IP parameters management - Manages the different MIB-2 related parameters of TCP/UDP and IP protocols.I won't be listing the API's here since you can look them up in MSDN any time. These API's provide extreme power over Windows networking and network management. You can for example, find out all the TCP connections established on your machine at any given time. Or, you can find out all the ports on which some server application is listening on your machine. You can break a TCP connection currently established on your machine. You can get vast amount of network statistics, configuration parameters and other information. So you can imagine how important these API's are for US and appreciate their power. Hence it's necessary to get a hold on these API's for us.MSDN is the best place to get all the information about these API's. There is a complete chapter dedicated to these API's in MSDN. There are sample applications about these in platform SDK.I submitted an article at codeproject on these API's long back, you can refer that too. http://www.codeproject.com/internet/tcpinfo.asp This also contain a sample demonstrating most of the API's, the aritcle is not that good though. Excercises: 1. Study different IP helper API's 2. Study the platform SDK samples on IP helper API's 3. Write a sample application using IP helper API's to list down all the TCP connections currently established on your machine, and ability to break any of that connection.4. Using these API's, write an application with similar functionality is windows ipconfig command (try ipconfig /all on command prompt).This is quite a big topic and should be enough for you to explore this week. We will try to cover some other topic next week. Thanks for your time, -Farooque
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