Whenever I write software that does any kind of non-trivial networking I run into the same problem. It would be great if I could write a program that would take care of the underlying details. It would provide a point of contact to the outside world and to processes that would like to take part in the protocol. The problem with this approach is that it will work wonderfully on any unix related operating system, but on windows this is impossible to do efficiently. The reason for this is that windows is a single user operating that is designed to work under the assumption that only one process is working at a time. This means that processes can't work in the background easily. It means that processes can't communicate easily, why would they need to when there's only one? It means that everything that is great about the unix design is missing in windows. ...