C# 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 4. Accessing the Internet

In This Chapter

• Taking a tour of the System.Net namespace

• Using built-in tools to access the network

• Making the network tools work for you

In my opinion, the reason that Microsoft had to create the .NET Framework in the first place was the lack of Internet interoperability within the existing infrastructure. COM just couldn't handle the Internet. The Internet works differently than most platforms, such as PCs. The Internet is based on protocols — carefully defined and agreed upon ways to get things like mail and file transfers working. Microsoft's environment before 2002 distinctly didn't handle those as well.

As you can see throughout this book, the .NET Framework is designed from the ground up to take the Internet and networking in general into consideration. Not surprisingly, that is nowhere more clear than it is in the System.Net namespace. The Internet takes first chair here, with Web tools taking up nine of the classes in the namespace.

In this fourth version of the framework, even more Internet functionality is baked in. Although in version one the focus was on tools used to build other tools (low-level functions), now it contains features that are useful to you, such as Web, mail, and File Transfer Protocol (FTP). Secure Sockets Layer — the Internet's transport security — is much easier to use in this version, as are FTP and mail, which previously required other, harder-to-use classes.

System.Net is a big, meaty namespace, and finding your way ...