What are some applications that I can develop using winsock apart from chat and file sharing applications?

Question

I am new to socket programming and I am looking for more info about what I can do with winsock.

Answer 1

Any Windows program that accesses the Internet is using Winsock. You could write any of those programs. I'm not going to list them here. :-)

(Although to be fair, most will be using higher-level APIs on top of Winsock, which is usually a more productive way to go. If you want to write a Twitter client, then since the Twitter API works over HTTP you'd use the Window HTTP libraries rather than Winsock.)

Answer 2

Any kind of distributed program that requires two or more machines to talk to each other across the network. Say, for example, you have a program running on one computer that's processing data and you want to publish updates to other computers from time to time. The processing computer can send a UDP datagram with its status, and programs running on other computers can listen for those updates.

As RichieHindle said, any Windows program that uses the network is eventually going through Winsock, although most use higher level interfaces rather than muck about with sockets directly.