Network development is writing code that will allow our application to send and receive data from remote services or devices. In the introduction of this chapter, I mentioned about buying my first modem and connecting with bulletin board services across the city that I lived in. The large majority of these bulletin board services used a single modem, which meant that only one user could connect to them at any one time. These bulletin boards would seem very strange and archaic for those that grew up with the Internet; however, back then, they were how computers shared information. At that time, being able to connect to a computer across town and upload/download files was amazing. Today, however, we communicate with services and devices all over the world without thinking twice about it.

Back when I first started writing applications, it was rare to develop an application that communicated over a standard network, and it was also hard to find developers with experience...