Socket Programming using C# - Part I

If you have dealt with sockets in the past, you may be interested in learning how it is done using C# technology. Read more ...The purpose of this article is to show you how you can do socket programming in C#. This article assumes some familiarity with the socket programming, though you need not to be expert in socket programming. There are several flavors to socket programming - like client side , server side , blocking or synchronous , non-blocking or asynchronous etc.

With all these flavors in mind , I have decided to break this subject into two parts. In the part 1 I will start with the client side blocking socket. Later on in the second part I will show you how to create server side and non-blocking.

Network programming in windows is possible with sockets. A socket is like a handle to a file. Socket programming resembles the file IO as does the Serial Communication. You can use sockets programming to have two applications communicate with each other. The application are typically on the different computers but they can be on same computer. For the two applications to talk to each either on the same or different computers using sockets one application is generally a server that keeps listening to the incoming requests and the other application acts as a client and makes the connection to the server application.

The server application can either accept or reject the connection. If the server accepts the connection, a dialog can begin with between the client and the server. Once the client is done with whatever it needs to do it can close the connection with the server. Connections are expensive in the sense that servers allow finite connections to occur. During the time client has an active connection it can send the data to the server and/or receive the data.

The complexity begins here. When either side (client or server) sends data the other side is supposed to read the data. But how will the other side know when data has arrived. There are two options - either the application needs to poll for the data at regular intervals or there needs to be some sort of mechanism that would enable application to get notifications and application can read the data at that time. Well , after all Windows is an event driven system and the notification system seems an obvious and best choice and it in fact is.

As I said the two applications that need to communicate with each other need to make a connection first. In order for the two application to make connections the two applications need to identify each other ( or each other's computer ). Computers on network have a unique identifier called I.P. address which is represented in dot-notation like 10.20.120.127 etc. Lets see how all this works in .NET.

System.Net.Sockets Namespace

Before we go any further, download the source code attached with this article. Extract the zip file to a folder say c:\Temp you will see following two folders :

• Server
• Client

In the Server folder there will be one EXE . And in the client there will be the source code in C# that is our client. There will be one file called SocketClient.sln which the solution file . If you double click that your VS.NET will be launched and you will see the project SocketClientProj in the solution. Under this project you will have SocketClientForm.cs file.

Also there is a field where you can specify port number at which the Server is listening. The server app I have provided here listens at port 8221. So I have specified port to be 8221.

After specifying these parameters we need to connect to the server. So pressing Connect will connect to the server and to close the connection press Close. To send some data to the server type some data in the field near the button name Tx and if you press Rx the application will block unless there is some data to read.
With this info lets now try to check the code behind this:

Socket programming in .NET is made possible by Socket class present inside the System.Net.Sockets namespace.
Socket class has several method and properties and a constructor.
The first step is to create an object of this class.
Since there is only one constructor we have no choice but to use it.

Here is how to create the socket:

m_socListener = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork,SocketType.Stream,ProtocolType.IP);

The first parameter is the address family which we will use interNetwork - other options include Banyan NetBios etc.
AddressFamily is an enum defined in Sockets namespace.
Next we need to specify socket type: and we would use reliable two way connection-based sockets (stream) instead of un-reliable Connectionless sockets ( datagrams) . So we obviously specify stream as the socket type and finally we are using TCP/IP so we would specify protocol type as Tcp.

Once we have created a Socket we need to make a connection to the server since we are using connection-based communication.
To connect to the remote computer we need to know the IP Address and port at which to connect.
In .NET there is a class under System.Net namespace called IPEndPoint which represents a network computer as an IP address and a port number.

The IPEndPoint has two constructors - one that takes a IP Address and Port number and one that takes long and port number. Since we have computer IP address we would use the former

public IPEndPoint(System.Net.IPAddress address, int port);

As you can see the first parameter takes a IPAddress object. If you examine the IPAddress class you will see that it has a static method called Parse that returns IPAddress given a string ( of dot notation ) and second parameter will be the port number. Once we have endpoint ready we can use Connect method of Socket class to connect to the end point ( remote server computer ).
Here is the code:

System.Net.IPAddress ipAdd = System.Net.IPAddress.Parse("10.10.101.200");
System.Net.IPEndPoint remoteEP = new IPEndPoint (iAdd,8221);
m_socClient.Connect (remoteEP);

These three lines of code will make a connection to the remote host running on computer with IP 10.10.101.200 and listening at port 8221. If the Server is running and started ( listening ), the connection will succeed. If however the server is not running an exception called SocketException will be thrown. If you catch the exception and check the Message property of the exception in this case you see following text:

"No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it."

Similarly if you already have made a connection and the server somehow dies , you will get following exception if you try to send data.

"An existing connection was forcibly closed by the remote host"

Assuming that the connection is made, you can send data to other side using the Send method of the Socket class.
Send method has several overloads. All of them take a byte array . For example if you want to send "Hello There" to host you can use following call:

try
{
String szData = "Hello There";
byte[] byData = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(szData);
m_socClient.Send(byData);
}
catch (SocketException se)
{
MessageBox.Show ( se.Message );
}

Note that the Send method is blocking. What it means the call will block till the data has been sent or an exception has been thrown. There is an non-blocking version of the send which we will discuss in the next part of this article.
Similar to Send there is a Receive method on the Socket class. You can receive data using following call:

byte [] buffer = new byte[1024];
int iRx = m_socClient.Receive (buffer);

The Receive method again is blocking. It means that if there is no data available the call will block until some data arrives or an exception is thrown.

Non-blocking version of Receive method is more useful than the non-blocking version of Send because if we opt for block Receive , we are effectively doing polling. There is no events about data arrival. This model does not work well for serious applications. But all that is the subject of our next part of this article. For now we will settle with the blocking version.

When you launch the Server, click Start to start listening. The Server listens at port 8221. So make sure you specify the port number 8221 in the port field of our client application. And in the IPAddress field of Client App enter the IP Address of the machine on which the Server is running. If you send some data to server from the client by pressing Tx button, you will see that data in the grayed out edit box.