What are the alternatives to Socket Programming?

Question

I was browsing around for programming troubleshooters, and I was wondering what the alternate would be for Socket Programming; if there is one.

Answer 1

Assuming you have control over the protocol being used, you could go for a higher level of abstraction like .NET's Remoting or WCF.

Answer 2

The question is rather vague and does not explain what MrM's issues with socket programming are, or what he is trying to accomplish.

An actual alternative to sockets would e.g. be (Win)Pcap, for which .net wrappers exist and that does not sit on top of the socket layer, as the other answers given so far.

There is also RDMA, which also does not use sockets, or much of the network stack at all, geared towards highest performance, but is not compatible with common IP networking.

Then there is the opposite approach: Getting high performance while still using standard sockets, by changing the underbelly with vendor-specific network stacks such as OpenOnload's. Many of these stacks however only run on the hardware of the specific vendor.