SNMP COM Component, MIB Compiler and SNMP Tools

The new SNMP Builder v3.2 for Visual Basic 5,6 and .NET supports Windows 2000/XP/NT/Me/98/95. The SNMP Builder v3.2 has a wealth of exciting new features.

The SNMP Builder includes a MIB Compiler. The friendly and flexible graphic user interface of this application allows the quick and easy accomplishment of the MIB compilation process. A programmer can determine the correct order of MIBs to compile in a matter of seconds using powerful built-in error processing and file search facilities. The final step of the MIB compilation process is the generation of Visual Basic modules with MIB object definitions and helper subroutines.

The Mib Compiler enables SNMP object references using symbolic names. This makes programming easier and simplifies the software maintenance and modification process.

The implementation of the SNMP module is drastically improved. The new implementation is a COM component instead of an ActiveX control. This improvement is very important because:

it retains ALL the advantages of ActiveX controls, such as events, syntax autocompletion in IDE editor, context sensitive help, etc;
it does not restrict the application type to be a GUI application;
it allows the dynamic creation and release of SNMP objects.

New efficient, easy to use and versatile methods have been added to make software development even easier and more pleasant.

A table retrieval process is now literary a single method call. The SNMP component handles all the complexities and special conditions internally. Such as sparse tables, inability of some agents to return a complete row in single request because of PDU size limitations, table row inconsistency when a table is rapidly changing, the necessity to code both get-next and get-bulk for optimal performance, etc.

The table retrieval method allows retrieving either a complete table or just a subset of columns in any order. The result is delivered to a VB application in an event as a two dimensional array of table items.

Continuing our tradition to create tools that expand your design horizon, instead of coercing you into limited choice proprietary paradigm; the programming interface was significantly improved. Many new methods were added to the SNMP component to optimize network performance and to enable the handling of complex architectural choices. Here are few of many features expanding your design choices:

automatic port assignment;
the ability to query ports in use;
a socket buffer size control enabling to create more robust applications;
multi-homed machines support ( computers with more than one IP address );
the ability to multiplex/demultiplex different operations like network discovery with MIB traversal;
better malformed packet handling;
multicast address handling.

Backward Compatibility with SNMP Toolkit

The SNMP Builder is backward compatible with the SNMP Toolkit. It fully supports all the features of the SNMP Toolkit's ActiveX control:

automatic request retransmission
the ability to send the same request to multiple destinations in a single method invocation;
the ability to send multiple requests to multiple destinations using a single method call;
message receiving events;
flexible and efficient PDU header fields and variable bindings handling;
SNMP v1 and v2c support;
detailed exception information when methods are not invoked properly significantly improving the debugging process;
detailed context sensitive help with a large amount of sample code in the help topics enables cutting and pasting of the code, speeding up the development;
numerous examples well illustrate all aspects of network management software development using the SNMP component programming interface.

As with the SNMP Toolkit, the SNMP Builder comes with two very useful SNMP Sender and Tracer utilities. These two GUI utilities provide a much more precise and flexible interface (comparing to MIB browser) assisting in debugging of SNMP software and also in studying how the existing SNMP software works in real life applications.

The Tracer utility replaces the need for a very expensive protocol analyzers. It can display both parsed SNMP message fields (SNMP message header, PDU fields and variable binding list details) and raw message data. The trace can be saved and printed. The utility can receive on standard SNMP ports: 161 and 162, and also on non-standard ports.

The Sender utility includes a graphic editor enabling the creation of SNMP request messages with precise control of message type, header fields and variable binding list. The utility can send the requests to a specified destination, displaying the details about sent requests and received replies. The sender can send the same request multiple times to a single destination, measuring network performance and the maximum number of requests an agent can process per second. These requests can be saved and then used later on during regression testing.

The detailed programming guide and reference manual in Adobe Acrobat format contains hyperlinks which simplify the quick reference look-up and serves as an on-line help. The extensive programming guide illustrates all the aspects, features and pitfalls of using class library objects, methods and properties to achieve maximum performance, reliability and flexibility of the software being developed.