Visual Basic® .NET by Example

Fundamental Concepts

The Internet is a large network of computers, which are exchanging information in various formats, using a number of protocols. You can think of a protocol as a convention (or a set of conventions) that describes the formatting of data exchanged between the computers of this network. You have to keep in mind that the Internet is made of a very large number of interconnected computers of various types (from large mainframes to small wireless devices), running an even larger variety of operating systems (all flavors of Windows, Unix, and so on). To ensure that the applications running on all these computers can exchange data in a useful fashion, a number of protocols have been adopted over time. One of the most commonly used ...