Windows – Is NetBIOS really gone on Windows

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I posted a similar question on StackOverflow. Somebody suggested me to post similar question here and see if anybody can give me some insight.

From MSDN, I was told that NetBIOS is no longer supported starting from Windwos Vista. Sure enough, I can no longer see any NetBIOS name from the network properties.

However, when I am writing codes on my Windows 7, I still encounter NetBIOS names in many places. For example

  1. I can still use "MYDOMAIN\Harvey" to logon my machine, where I believe MYDOMAIN is a NetBIOS name.
  2. The environment variables COMPUTERNAME and USERDOMAIN are still NetBIOS names. I am expecting to see a DNS names here
  3. My SQL Server instance names coming up from my SQL Server Management Studio is still something like MYMACHINE\Instance1.

I am guessing Microsoft still maintains some pieces of it for backward compatibility. I want to understand how Windows 7 going to resolve the NetBIOS name to an IP address. I found this article explaining how the NetBIOS name resolution works. I am afraid this is no longer true for Windows 7. At least there is no WINS server for me. Can somebody explain to me how the Windows 7 do the NetBIOS name resolution?

UPDATE
If the protocol is gone, how does the NetBIOS name resolution happens? Does it still talk to WINS? If yes, is it still using NetBIOS protocol to talk to WINS?

Best Answer

"NetBIOS" the protocol (NBF) is gone, long replaced by NBT, CIFS, etc. "NetBIOS" as part of the name of other things still exists.

Windows still has an embedded WINS server, even if there's no dedicated WINS server on the network.

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