I'm in the middle of porting some code to be compiled with MSVC 9.0, and one of my coworkers mentioned that we would need to link against WS2_32.dll because now only Winsock 2 was supported. Is there any truth to this? Our code is pretty old and heavily dependent on wsock32.dll, so this requirement could be a huge obstacle for the project.
Thanks
As long as you're not using any Winsock 2 specific features, you should be just fine linking against wsock32.dll. The old Winsock 1.1 API is not deprecated. Winsock 2 is an extension to Winsock 1, not a replacement for it.
Because Winsock 2 is purely an extension, a program that currently works against wsock32.dll should still work fine when relinked against ws2_32.dll. The best reason not to do that is if you still have to support stock Windows 95 systems, since Winsock 2 is a downloadable add-on for those systems. Winsock 2 was introduced with Windows 98 and Windows NT 4.
There are degrees to Winsock 2 support. A program using all the newest features available under Windows 7 may not work with Windows 95 even with the Winsock 2 add-on. Sometimes the reverse is true, too: the newer Winsock stacks have removed some raw sockets support available in Windows 2000 and XP, for instance.
Bottom line, test on all platforms you have to support.