I am coding the call in a business object, which will need to be available to Windows and Web services and applications.

I actually got it working. The embarrassing truth is that my problem was that I was given incomplete protocol information. The AS/400 service that I am using needs the first 5 characters to denote the length of the command string (including the 5 character command length prefix) that I am passing and I wasn't prefixing my command with that information, so the AS/400 service was silently choking.

I do have some questions about the socket object that VS.NET documentation didn't answer, though.

When would I need to use the bind method?

How can I get the IP address of machine running the program if I do want to bind?

Should I set any of the SocketOptions? Currently, I am setting SocketOptionName.SendTimeout and SocketOptionName.ReceiveTimeout. Do I need to, or are the .NET defaults reasonable values?

Thanks for your help.