SocketTools 11 Build 2218 (11.0.2218.1855) was released on February 20, 2025. This is a complete release which incorporates updates from previous releases, as well as all subsequent hotfixes. Release notes for this update are included with the installation package.
Downloads
- SocketTools .NET Edition
- SocketTools ActiveX Edition
- SocketTools Library Edition
- SocketTools Subscription
Please review the release notes for more information about the changes included with this update. SocketTools 11 supports the current release of Windows 11 and Windows Server 2025. For the SocketTools Subscription and .NET Edition, this update includes .NET 9.0 assemblies for use with Visual Studio 2022 17.12 and later versions.
This update includes a change which provides better support for secure connections using older versions of Windows 10 (prior to build 22H2) and Windows Server 2016. They would attempt to establish connections using TLS 1.3, but under some circumstances those connections would fail with a security context error. With this change, the client will now silently revert to using TLS 1.2 rather than returning an error condition. Your applications will no longer have to explicitly specify the fallback option when establishing the connection. Please note that if you need to establish a TLS 1.0 or TLS 1.1 connection to a legacy server which does not support TLS 1.2, you will still need to use the fallback option.
For developers using the Library Edition, this update also corrects a typo in the SocketTools header file which could prevent compilation if your project targeted MFC. We also made a change to how the 64-bit libraries (DLLs) are compiled to use high-entropy ALSR, which increases the randomness of the address space in which the libraries are loaded. This is a security measure which can make it more difficult to exploit memory corruption vulnerabilities in your applications. This change also includes the SocketTools .NET interop library which is referenced by the assemblies.
For the SocketTools .NET Edition, this update includes builds which use the latest .NET 8.0 and 9.0 SDKs. If your projects are using .NET 6.0 or .NET 7.0, remember that these versions are no longer supported by Microsoft. We will continue to include assemblies which target those versions to assist with migrating your projects, but it's recommended that you upgrade them to the .NET 8.0 LTS release.
You do not need to uninstall previous versions of SocketTools when installing this update. For example, if you also have SocketTools 10 installed on your development system, you do not need to uninstall that version.
The SocketTools installer packages and components have been digitally signed with an extended validation (EV) Authenticode certificate which uses SHA-256 signatures.