Released: May 15, 2023

Updates in 11.0.2130.1468

Features

• Added support for the HTTP/2.0 protocol in all HTTP client components.
• Updated security options for TLS 1.2 (and later versions) and SSH 2.0 to use cipher suites available in Microsoft Windows 11 and Windows Server 2022. Older, less secure cipher suites have been deprecated and will not be used when establishing a connection. A fallback option is available to connect to legacy servers using TLS 1.0.
• The default security protocol and cipher suite selection for all secure connections have been updated for Windows 10.
• Expanded support for internationalization and Unicode for all components. This also extends to the ANSI versions of exported functions which will now accept UTF-8 encoded string parameters to provide better support for Unicode with legacy applications.
• Improved processing of large MIME messages with a complex message structure which includes multipart/alternative messages and large file attachments. The limit on the number of attached files in a message have been removed.
• Improved handling of mail messages which include non-Latin character sets and expanded support for alternative character sets used with Japanese, Chinese and Korean languages. Messages which contain a mix of UTF-8 and ANSI character sets will be internally converted to use Unicode for uniformity of processing.
• Improved transfer speeds for large files using the FTP and HTTP components over high-speed networks and removed the bandwidth limiting feature for high-priority transfers. A high precision mode is available when measuring transfer rates.
• Improved internal memory management to limit fragmentation of the heap and reduce the process and client session heap size after references to those objects have been released. Each component shares a private heap which is isolated from the general process heap used by the application.
• Improved the internal server monitoring thread to be less resource intensive with a large number of transitory client connections. This change should particularly improve performance with the HTTP server when accepting many client connections over a short period of time.
• Improved handling of malformed MIME messages which contain invalid header blocks or a malformed multipart structure, including invalid boundary identifiers used to define the different parts of a multipart/alternative message.
• Removed support for deprecated Diffie-Hellman group exchange algorithms which could prevent a client from establishing a SSH 2.0 connection. SocketTools will no longer offer older, less secure security algorithms when connecting with a server. All support for SSH 1.0 has been removed.
• New installers and Windows Installer (MSI) packages have been created. The new installers provide an improved installation experience and provide support silent installation and a streamlined update process. The MSI installer packages are included to assist with easier redistribution of your application.
• Examples have been added for Visual Studio 2022 and Library Edition examples have been updated to use the current toolset. Note some examples use Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC) which should be installed for the current toolset. SocketTools will continue to support both MFC and ATL based projects.
• The minimum supported version for Windows 10 is now Windows 10 21H2. Earlier versions of Windows 10 are no longer supported and won't receive security updates from Microsoft, although SocketTools will continue to work on those platforms.
• Support for Windows XP and Windows Vista have been removed. These platforms are no longer secure and do not support current versions of TLS. This release of SocketTools uses internal API functions which are not available to Windows XP and the SocketTools components cannot be loaded on that platform.
• New HTML Help documentation, PDF documentation and a README.md file have been included which provides information about the current release.

Fixes

• Addressed an issue which could cause the SocketTools server components to stop accepting connections and potentially throw an exception if instance of the server was destroyed while multiple client sessions were in the process of disconnecting from the server.
• Improved handling of aborted client connections to a server, particularly when multiple clients lose connection to the server at the same time. This addresses a situation where the server could potentially stop accepting new connections and would not release the client socket handles allocated for those sessions.
• Corrected an issue which could cause file transfers to fail if a specified restart offset, used with resumed file transfers. was greater than 4GB.
• Updating or uninstalling SocketTools will no longer display error messages about being unable to unregister or remove 64-bit components.