The Xceed Winsock Library is designed to offer all the flexibility provided by the Winsock-2 API, including support for protocol independence, quality of service and multicast, while offering an easy to use object model and a built-in multithreaded low-level I/O engine. The low-level engine uses threads efficiently and takes advantage of Winsock-2 features such as overlapped i/o and completion ports (when available) so your applications can handle large loads without overtaxing your server(s). The library's functionality can be accessed through a custom COM interface which offers minimal overhead and maximum flexibility, or through an OLE automation COM interface designed to make writing efficient network code extremely easy and straightforward.