Legacy Update: Get back online, activate, and install updates on your legacy Windows PC

The Windows protocol documentation provides technical specifications for protocols that are implemented and used in client and server versions of the Windows operating system. The protocol documentation set also includes related overview and reference documents.

Files

Status: Deleted This download is no longer available on microsoft.com. The downloads below are archives provided by the Internet Archive Wayback Machine from the Microsoft Download Center prior to August 2018.

No files found

File sizes and hashes are retrieved from the Wayback Machine’s indexes. They may not match the latest versions of files hosted on Microsoft servers.

Windows 10 and Windows Server 2015 Technical Preview operating systems as well as previous Windows client and server versions

The protocol specifications are available in the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF), which you can open by using Adobe Reader, available at http://www.adobe.com.

Note: For optimal readability of the PDF documents, it is recommended that they be opened and viewed by using the latest version of Adobe Reader. Earlier versions of Adobe Reader might not provide the same reading quality.

Individual PDF files should be stored in a single directory to enable linking between the protocol specifications. Note that if you download additional protocol documents from Microsoft, they should also be stored in the same directory to enable linking.

The self-extracting Zip file, WindowsProtocols.zip, contains all of the Windows protocol documents. Please download it and read the Readmefirst file. This package does not collect any personal information.