Before we look in detail at how the Internet Transfer Control works, you need to be sure you have a few other components installed on your computer or that you have access to them.
The TCP/IP protocol must be installed on your computer. This protocol comes with both Windows 95 and Windows NT. If you don’t have this protocol installed, you can install it from your Windows setup media. (If you’re not sure whether you have TCP/IP, you can check by opening the Start menu; choosing Settings, Control Panel, and then Network; and looking in the list box at the top of the screen on the Configuration tab.)
Life on the Internet is not much fun unless you have a remote computer with which you can communicate. This remote computer should be running an FTP or HTTP server (preferably both) that you have a private account on. You can use public FTP and HTTP servers, but in most cases you’ll be limited to read-only communication. A better way is to set up your own FTP or HTTP server. This is easy with Microsoft Windows NT Server because both an FTP and an HTTP server are included with the operating system.
If you don’t have access to a remote computer capable of running the requisite server software, fear not. A number of FTP and HTTP servers are available both commercially and via shareware, and provided you have installed TCP/IP on your PC, you can run them on the same machine that you use to develop with the Internet Transfer Control. Microsoft Personal Web Server can be downloaded for free from http://www.microsoft.com and contains both an FTP and an HTTP server.