I have had luck using the socket object directly (rather than the TCP client). I create a Server object that looks something like this (I've edited some stuff such as exception handling out for brevity, but I hope that the idea comes across.)...
public class Server()
{
private Socket sock;
// You'll probably want to initialize the port and address in the
// constructor, or via accessors, but to start your server listening
// on port 8080 and on any IP address available on the machine...
private int port = 8080;
private IPAddress addr = IPAddress.Any;
// This is the method that starts the server listening.
public void Start()
{
// Create the new socket on which we'll be listening.
this.sock = new Socket(
addr.AddressFamily,
SocketType.Stream,
ProtocolType.Tcp);
// Bind the socket to the address and port.
sock.Bind(new IPEndPoint(this.addr, this.port));
// Start listening.
this.sock.Listen(this.backlog);
// Set up the callback to be notified when somebody requests
// a new connection.
this.sock.BeginAccept(this.OnConnectRequest, sock);
}
// This is the method that is called when the socket recives a request
// for a new connection.
private void OnConnectRequest(IAsyncResult result)
{
// Get the socket (which should be this listener's socket) from
// the argument.
Socket sock = (Socket)result.AsyncState;
// Create a new client connection, using the primary socket to
// spawn a new socket.
Connection newConn = new Connection(sock.EndAccept(result));
// Tell the listener socket to start listening again.
sock.BeginAccept(this.OnConnectRequest, sock);
}
}
Then, I use a separate Connection class to manage the individual connection with the remote host. That looks something like this...
public class Connection()
{
private Socket sock;
// Pick whatever encoding works best for you. Just make sure the remote
// host is using the same encoding.
private Encoding encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
public Connection(Socket s)
{
this.sock = s;
// Start listening for incoming data. (If you want a multi-
// threaded service, you can start this method up in a separate
// thread.)
this.BeginReceive();
}
// Call this method to set this connection's socket up to receive data.
private void BeginReceive()
{
this.sock.BeginReceive(
this.dataRcvBuf, 0,
this.dataRcvBuf.Length,
SocketFlags.None,
new AsyncCallback(this.OnBytesReceived),
this);
}
// This is the method that is called whenever the socket receives
// incoming bytes.
protected void OnBytesReceived(IAsyncResult result)
{
// End the data receiving that the socket has done and get
// the number of bytes read.
int nBytesRec = this.sock.EndReceive(result);
// If no bytes were received, the connection is closed (at
// least as far as we're concerned).
if (nBytesRec <= 0)
{
this.sock.Close();
return;
}
// Convert the data we have to a string.
string strReceived = this.encoding.GetString(
this.dataRcvBuf, 0, nBytesRec);
// ...Now, do whatever works best with the string data.
// You could, for example, look at each character in the string
// one-at-a-time and check for characters like the "end of text"
// character ('\u0003') from a client indicating that they've finished
// sending the current message. It's totally up to you how you want
// the protocol to work.
// Whenever you decide the connection should be closed, call
// sock.Close() and don't call sock.BeginReceive() again. But as long
// as you want to keep processing incoming data...
// Set up again to get the next chunk of data.
this.sock.BeginReceive(
this.dataRcvBuf, 0,
this.dataRcvBuf.Length,
SocketFlags.None,
new AsyncCallback(this.OnBytesReceived),
this);
}
}
You can use your Connection object to send data by calling its Socket directly, like so...
this.sock.Send(this.encoding.GetBytes("Hello to you, remote host."));
As I said, I've tried to edit the code here for posting, so I apologize if there are any errors in it.
