Using The C# Sockets Helper Classes

Summary

In this chapter, you explored the .NET helper classes that are used in creating network programs. Whereas the Socket class allows you to manually create network programs using traditional Unix network programming methods, the three classes in this chapter—TcpClient, TcpListener, and UdpClient—help you produce network programs with a minimum amount of coding. The TcpClient and TcpListener classes are used for creating TCP network programs, and the UdpClient class for UDP programs.

You must be able to make the sent data intelligible to the receiving system. Text data is usually not a problem, but there are particular challenges to sending binary data. The C# language offers many types of binary data that must be converted to a byte array before sending to a remote system. The BitConverter class does this work. Once the data is converted to a byte array, it can be transmitted across the network to a remote system using one of the network classes.

Not all systems use the same method of representing binary data. The order in which bytes of multibyte values are stored is crucial to interpreting the data. Systems that use the big endian storage method cannot immediately interpret data from systems that use the little endian method. Communicating the binary data accurately requires conversion to a generic network byte order before sending the data. On the remote system, the converted data must be decoded from network byte order to the local system’s byte order.

Transmitting complex data classes across the network can also be difficult. The simplest method is to convert each data element individually into a byte array and combine the byte arrays into a single large-byte array for transmission. After the array is received, it must be reassembled back into the original data class