I am building a system that uses the Winsock control for net comms, but may want to use other controls for subsequent releases. Because of this, I would like to build a "shell" class around the Winsock control, so that if I later decide to use some other control, I can make all of my changes in the "shell" class only.

The problem is, I can't figure out how to reference the Winsock control in a class. I can Dim a variable as Winsock, but cannot reference that variable without a runtime error. Is there something I am missing?