Microsoft KB Archive/98593

= Streams Development Environment =

Article ID: 98593

Article Last Modified on 10/31/2006



This article was previously published under Q98593



SUMMARY
Streams is a development environment for network transports found in recent versions of the UNIX operating system and a few other platforms, including Windows NT. It functions as would a set of APIs for developing or rapidly porting a network transport written in C, although it actually is privileged driver code talking to the UNIX kernel or, in the case of Windows NT, to various executive components. Streams on Windows NT is implemented as a kernel-level DLL.



MORE INFORMATION
In Windows NT, the Streams environment has been enhanced to help deal with multiprocessing issues such as the synchronization of driver-level resources, which can be very complex in an SMP system. The NT extensions are based on and compatible with Streams extensions done by Sequent for their SMP version of UNIX (Dynix).

Streams is commonly but inaccurately thought of as an interprocess communication method such as sockets. This is not so: Streams has nothing to do with the behavior of a network transport at the application layer or on the wire. A transport implemented in the Streams environment behaves like any other transport, and neither applications on a given system nor networking code on other systems can tell the transport is Streams-based.

Streams is useful mostly to people who implement network protocol stacks because it allows them to port their code from one platform to another much more efficiently than would otherwise be possible.

Additional query words: 2.00 2.10 2.10a 2.20

Keywords: KB98593

-

[mailto:TECHNET@MICROSOFT.COM Send feedback to Microsoft]

© Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.