.NET Common Language Runtime Unleashed

Connection Management

The CLR manages code at a “global” level. You have seen many of the benefits of managed code. One of the benefits is that although an individual thread might have lowered performance because of the additional overhead of “management,” the application as a whole greatly benefits. This same philosophy is behind managing connections.

A ServicePoint provides an application with an endpoint to connect to Internet resources. More important, a ServicePoint class contains information that can aide in optimizing connections. Each ServicePoint is identified with a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), or more specifically, an instance of Uri class.

You can get a feel for the type of information contained in a Uri by looking at the