Question

I’m still attempting to do something with networking, and instead of using Beej’s tutorial, I turned to MSDN.com. It says I need to include “Ws32_32.lib” as a library. I cannot find this library, and I believe it is with the VS 2010 SDK. I DLed the SDK, and it only works with the professional or ultimate or something. Maybe I’ve just answered my own question here but, is there a way to actually use windows sockets with VS express? I understand professional or ultimate cost exorbitant sums of money (because they’re made for businesses, I’m just a single novice/hobbyist). Is there any way to use windows sockets with VS express?

Maybe I should just turn to codeblocks or QT…

Answer 1

Have you looked at the MSDN Getting Started with Winsock guide? The provided sample code works for me with plain Visual C++ 2010 Express. This snippet compiles cleanly and the #pragma tells the linker which library is needed.

#include <stdio.h>
#include <winsock2.h>
#include <ws2tcpip.h>

// link with Ws2_32.lib
#pragma comment(lib, "Ws2_32.lib")

int main()
{
    WSADATA wsaData;

    // Initialize Winsock
    int result = WSAStartup(MAKEWORD(2, 2), &wsaData);
    if (result != 0) {
        printf("WSAStartup failed: %d\n", result);
        return 1;
    }

    // Your code here

    WSACleanup();
    return 0;
}