Hello,
Datasocket is a protocol that is proprietary to National Instruments. As long as you are communicating only with other NI software such as LabVIEW or CVI Datasocket will be a reasonable option for your project.
Datatsocket is built on top of TCP and intended to be a higher level API and easier to use for the most common uses of NIs software. As this is an higher-level abstraction of TCP/IP there is less flexibility in the way the protocol is used compared to TCP/IP.
For the most part if you are using only NI software and would simply like to send data items between two applications Datasocket will work for your application. If you need more flexibility or need to communicate to third party applications you should consider using TCP/IP directly.
Scott Y
NI