Welcome to Window's Web Transports Blog

This is a collaborative Weblog from the Web Transports Team in Windows Networking. As a team we work on the http stacks in Windows; http.sys the kernel part of the IIS 6.0 Web Server (part of Windows Server 2003) and its own developer API, wininet.dll which is the client side HTTP stack at the heart of Internet Explorer, and winhttp.dll which is the client side HTTP stack favored by server applications relying on performance and reliability.

 

At this point we aren’t sure exactly what sort of information we will put up here, but it probably will be related to whatever we get asked in the comments and whatever we are working on that week. Please don’t hesitate to post a comment with any questions or topics you wish us to talk about in the future. A lot of it will be developer focused, some content will be end user focused (especially on the wininet.dll/IE side).

 

If you don’t know what an HTTP stack is, it’s a protocol stack that talks the W3C’s HTTP protocol on behalf of applications. That’s the main protocol used on the web. It’s gone through a few versions, from 0.9 to 1.0 and now 1.1. We’ll probably write an entry or point to some good references on what has changed over time in the protocol’s evolution.

 

By the way, my name is Ari Pernick, and I’m a test development lead for web transports. As we post over time you will get an introduction to some of the Developers, Testers, Program Management, Product Support and others who contribute to our team.

 

UPDATE: In the comments below I claimed that pipelinning would be in Longhorn Version of Winhttp. It was early in the product cycle and since then, for a number of reasons, the code changes to support pipelinning support didn't make it into the final release. Sorry for any confusion.