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Simultaneous Access to Multiple Transport Protocols

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A transport protocol must be properly installed on the system and registered with Windows Sockets to be accessible to an application. The Ws2_32.dll library exports a set of functions to facilitate the registration process. This includes creating a new registration and removing an existing one.

When new registrations are created, the caller (that is, the stack vendor's installation script) supplies one or more filled in WSAPROTOCOL_INFO structures containing a complete set of information about the protocol. For more information, see Windows Sockets 2 SPI. Any transport stack installed in this manner is referred to as a Windows Sockets service provider.

On Windows XP with Service Pack 2 (SP2), Windows Server 2003 with Service Pack 1 (SP1), and Windows Vista and later. the Winsock catalog that contains a list of installed transport and namespace providers can be displayed in a command prompt with the following command:

netsh winsock show catalog

The Microsoft Windows Software Development Kit (SDK) includes Sporder.exe, which enables the user to view and modify the order in which service providers are enumerated. Using Sporder.exe, a user can manually establish a particular TCP/IP protocol stack as the default TCP/IP provider if more than one such stack is present.

The Sporder.exe application uses exported functions from Sporder.dll to reorder the service providers. As a result, installation applications can use the interface provided by Sporder.dll to programmatically reorder service providers.