Advice on multithreading

Hi,

I am currently doing research for a 40 hour project which will begin in january for school. I am planning on writing a P2P network chat application, but given the time constraints, it will have to be quite simple. I wanted some advice on how I would go about ensuring that the program can simultaneously send and receive messages. I think I need multithreading, but on the other hand from what I remember about forking, that might be all I need. Could anyone offer any advice on this? The program will almost certainly have to run in windows, you know what schools are like, and it will have to have a gui, so I guess portability is out the windows with that one :P

Thanks,

Calef13

Actually after a little research I realise that forking is really not done on windows, I'm better off with multithreading.

Calef13

Or you might consider looking up the select() function, in particular the timeout feature.

Does Windows use select() for async I/O? Well, I suppose it supports it, but completion ports might be a better choice, as they integrate better into the message system.

Or you could just use Boost.Asio and hide all that stuff.