June 25, 2004 - PCAUSA has been exploring how to integrate the Rawether
family with the .NET Framework for some time. Rawether V5.03.16.55
(February, 2003) included some experimental C# sample applications which, in
retrospect, were not very good... Since then we have gone through several
design and implementation iterations for a .NET Framework API for Rawether.

In parallel we have made improvements to the base Rawether suite (introduced
in V5.5) and are making similar improvements to Rawether for Windows CE. The
goals of the improvements to the base Rawether DLL and drivers has been to
provide additional functionality and to further unify the "Big Windows" and
"Little Windows" API. (These two APIs both provide the same functionality,
but are somewhat different.)

Rawether .NET will bring these improvements together in a unified API.

Rawether .NET provides the following features:

** A .NET Framework API for user-mode access to the Rawether NDIS protocol
drivers.

Written in C# and layered over the base Rawether W32N55 DLL and
platform-specific NDIS protocol drivers.

** Unified support for all platforms that support the .NET framework.
Including:

1.) Windows Millennium
2.) Windows 2000
3.) Windows XP
4.) Windows Server 2003
5.) Windows CE 3.X (Pocket PC 2002)
6.) Windows CE 4.X (Pocket PC 2003)

** Extensible API intended to support add-on NDIS IM driver and LWF driver
interfaces.

Of course, support for Windows XP does include support for Windows XP
embedded.

For those interested in taking a look at pre-release code, the links below
point to sources and output for simple C# console application that
exercises the Rawether .NET API. Although the sample is fairly crude, it
exercises most NDIS requests that I have had the occasion to be interested
in using myself. Of particular interest are that take the complexity out of
deciphering a BSSID list and other 802.11 NDIS operations.

EnumTest Console Application C# Code:
http://www.rawether.net/DotNet/EnumTest.txt

EnumTest Console Application Output:
http://www.rawether.net/DotNet/Output.txt

If you are interested in the Windows CE platform, then you might be
interested to know that the identical EnumTest C# application also works on
Pocket PC 2003 (with a dumb console emulator class added, of course...).

Warm regards,

Thomas F. Divine