SNMP ActiveX Control and SNMP Debugging and Testing Tools
Now supports Visual Basic 5,6 and .NET
The toolkit consists of:
- SNMPv2c and v1 ActiveX Control
- SNMP Utilities
- Examples
The development license grants free ActiveX control distribution without royalty fee.
The SNMP ActiveX Control has been redesigned. It has become much faster, more robust and adheres to the Visual Basic guidelines. The major differences with the previous release include:
- Events
- Use of properties in favor of methods
- Automatic request retransmission
- Ability to send to multiple destinations
- Vastly expanded and flexible methods
- On-line help
- Expanded manual
- Extended example set
- Better error handling and error reporting
- Use of symbolic names for SNMP constants and MIB-II objects
- Latest COM technology
- Captured traces of SNMP requests and responses
The SNMP ActiveX control is native for the Visual Basic development environment. It blends into VB and is intuitive and easy to use. Flexible by design, the SNMP control does not push programmers into any software architecture but is rather ready to adhere to a paradigm chosen by developers.
The control is based on the newest ATL 3.0 technology, which makes it slimmer, faster, more reliable and more suitable for automation objects.
The SNMP ActiveX control is using multiple threads that are created automatically by the control to handle asynchronous messages receive and request retransmission. The threads are created automatically by the control itself and do not require any programming at all. The threads allow the separation of the networking activity from the GUI interface, so the graphics interface never freezes.
Events
Events constitute the only notification mechanism used by the SNMP ActiveX control v2.3. The events notify a client program about:
Received replies
Received unsolicited events and notifications
No-responses to the messages sent with automatic retransmission
Use of properties in favor of methods
The SNMP ActiveX control uses properties whenever possible instead of methods, thus making debugging simpler and the code cleaner.
Automatic request retransmission
This feature will automatically retransmit requests several times when no response is received in the predefined time period. It frees developers from the tedious task of keeping track on the requests sent and replies received, timers, etc. The application will always receive event notification: either received message event or no-reply notification.
The ability to send to multiple destinations
This unique feature allows the sending of the same request to multiple IP addresses or different requests to different destinations. Control will automatically keep track on the requests that did not receive replies and retransmit only those with no replies received. This feature is very convenient when a manager application does network discovery, communicates with multiple agents or an agent needs to communication with multiple manager applications.
Vastly expanded and flexible methods
The ActiveX control is designed to blend into an architecture chosen by developers. The methods are expanded, parameter types are carefully chosen to cause the least possible data conversions in the client programs.
On-line help
The on-line context sensitive help makes programming with the SNMP ActiveX control easier, and more enjoyable. The on-line help contains programming reference and programming guide information.
Expanded manual
The manual contains a detailed programming guide and reference information sufficient to understand the intrinsic of the ActiveX control. Large amount of examples reduces the learning curve to minimum.
Extended set of examples
The toolkit v2.3 comes with many more examples than its predecessors. Some of the examples can be used as utilities helping to develop SNMP software. The examples were carefully chosen to cover the most common aspects of network management software development: retrieving table rows using GetNext and GetBulk, sending traps v1 and v2, discovering network, forwarding SNMP requests, sending SNMP commands, processing SNMP requests, etc.
Better error handling and error reporting
Error handling and error reporting are vastly improved. The error handling mechanism is designed to catch the design problems during developing phase. Error reporting provides debugging messages clearly stating the reason of an error significantly speeding up the debugging process.
Use of symbolic names for SNMP constants and MIB-II objects
The toolkit has two mechanisms for symbolic SNMP constants. The first one consists of read-only properties of the CSnmpType class. The second is the SnmpDefs.bas module that has constants' definitions. The Mib2Oid.bas module is provided to enable the usage of symbolic names for MIB-II variables.
Latest COM technology
The ActiveX control v2.3 has been redesigned to use the latest Microsoft COM technology. It's using ATL in favor of MFC. This technology is designed for automation object implementation without carrying the MFC overhead.
Captured traces of SNMP requests and responses
The toolkit manual incorporates an entire chapter with real life traces captured using the toolkit utilities for a variety of requests including, but not limited to, table traversing using Get-Next and Get-Bulk requests.
The ActiveX control is self-contained. It is based on the LogiSoft AR C++ SNMP library and does not depend on any third party SNMP software.