winsockprt is a Symbian OS network protocol module (a plug-in to ESock) that allows Symbian OS sockets to communicate via underlying WinSock sockets.
There are various means of providing the Symbian OS emulator with a network connection (including WinTAP and NT-RAS). In the most part these other technologies are preferable to winsockprt because they use the real Symbian TCP/IP stack, and so provide a more faithful emulation. However, they also tend to be more complex to configure. By contrast, winsockprt is enabled with a single command and needs no further configuration.
Beyond building fshell for your development environment, there is no further installation necessary.
By default winsockprt is disabled. To enable it, type:
wsp enable
or
wsp e
Once it is enabled, any attempt by Symbian code to open a socket (or resolver) on the implicit connection (i.e. without using RConnection) will result in winsockprt interacting with the WinSock library to provide a connection.
To disable winsockprt and go back to using the Symbian TCP/IP stack, type:
wsp disable
or
wsp d
To see the current state of the winsockprt, type:
wsp status
or
wsp s
No attempt is made to intercept the RConnection API, which means that code that uses this will continue to attempt to establish a real connection. If this succeeds, then any sockets attached to the connection will again be routed through the WinSock library. However, if it was possible to establish a real connection, then there probably isn't much point in using winsockprt - better to disable it and go back to using the real TCP/IP stack.
It is actually still possible to open winsockprt sockets even when the module is disabled. Disabled only means that the module isn't taking the place of the Symbian TCP/IP stack. Whether disabled or not, winsockprt always registers the following protocols with ESock and makes them available to clients:
KProtocolWinsockTcp KProtocolWinsockUdp
These are defined in \epoc32\include\winsockprt.h and allow software to explicitly use WinSock sockets along side normal Symbian sockets. This facility can be used by rcons to provide remote console via WinSock on the emulator without distrupting other TCP/IP clients.
Old versions of winsockprt used to replace various parts of the Symbian networking sub-system in order to try to convince clients that a suitable connection is available. In the multi-homed world of modern Symbian OS releases this behaviour is probably not appropriate. Instead therefore, to use winsockprt from via software the opens an explicit RConnection suitable IAP and Network entries will need to be present in the CommDb. There is a Null Agent (nullagt) that could be used to pretend to establish a connection. However, at the time of writing, there is nothing equivalent to a Null NIF that would also be needed to create a truely fake connection. It might be worth writing such a thing is this limitation is frequently hit.
Copyright (c) 2005-2010 Accenture. All rights reserved.