Socket Programming in C# - Part I
(Page 1 of 2 )
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.
Socket Programming in C# - Part I - The Article
(Page 2 of 2 )
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. Now build the code ( by pressing Ctrl-Shift-B) and run the code you will see the following dialog box:
As you can see the dialog box has a field for Host IP address ( which is the IP address of the machine on which you will run the Server Application ( located under Server folder) ). 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.
In order to use the source code and application here you would need to run the Server first:
Here is the way Server looks like:
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.
Socket Programming in C# - Part II Well
that is possible with a little effort. If you read the first part of
this article, you already know that the Socket class in the
Systems.Net.Sockets namespace has several methods like Receive and
Send which are blocking calls. Besides there are also functions like
BeginReceive , BeginSend etc. These are meant for asynchronous IO . For
example , there are at least two problems with the blocking Receive: Although you can argue that one can overcome these shortcomings
by multithreading meaning that one can spawn a new thread and let that
thread do the polling and notifies the main thread of the data. Well
this concept will work well. But even if you create a new thread it
would require your main thread to share the CPU time with this new
thread. Windows operating system (Windows NT /2000 /XP) provide what is
called Completion Port IO model for doing overlapped ( asynchronous)
IO. The details of IO
Completion port are beyond the scope of the current discussion, but to
make it simple you can think of IO Completion Ports as the most
efficient mechanism for doing asynchronous IO in Windows that is
provided by the Operating system. Completion Port model can be applied
to any kind of IO including the file read /write and serial
communication. The .NET asynchronous socket programming helper class's Socket provides the similar model. .NET
framework's Socket class provides BeginReceive method to receive data
asynchronously i.e., in an non-blocking manner The BeginReceive method
has following signature: public IAsyncResult BeginReceive( byte[] buffer, int offset, int size, SocketFlags socketFlags, AsyncCallback callback, object state ); The
way BeginReceive function works is that you pass the function a buffer
, a callback function (delegate) which will be called whenever data
arrives. The last parameter, object, to the BeginReceive can be any class derived from object ( even null ) . void AsyncCallback( IAsyncResult ar); As you can see the callback returns void and is passed in one parameter , IAsyncResult interface , which contains the status of the asynchronous receive operation. The
IAsyncResult interface has several properties. The first parameter -
AsyncState - is an object which is same as the last parameter that you
passed to BeginReceive(). The second property is AsyncWaitHandle which
we will discuss in a moment. The third property indicates whether the
receive was really asynchronous or it finished synchronously. The
important thing to follow here is that it not necessary for an
asynchronous function to always finish asynchronously - it can
complete immediately if the data is already present. Next parameter is
IsComplete which indicates whether the operation has completed or not. If you look at the signature of the BeginReceive again you will note that the function also returns IAsyncResult.
This is interesting. Just now I said that I will talk about the second
peoperty of the IAsyncResult in a moment. Now is that moment. The
second parameter is called AsyncWaitHandle. The AsyncWaitHandle is of type WaitHandle,
a class defined in the System.Threading namespace. WaitHandle class
encapsulates a Handle (which is a pointer to int or handle ) and
provides a way to wait for that handle to become signaled. The class
has several static methods like WaitOne ( which is similar to
WaitForSingleObject ) WaitAll ( similar to WaitForMultipleObjects with
waitAll true ) , WaitAny etc. Also there are overloads of these
functions available with timeouts. Coming
back to our discussion of IAsyncResult interface, the handle in
AsyncWaitHandle (WaitHandle) is signalled when the receive operation
completes. So if we wait on that handle infinitely we will be able to
know when the receive completed. This means if we pass that WaitHandle
to a different thread, the different thread can wait on that handle
and can notify us of the fact that the data has arrived and so that we
can read the data. So you must be wondering if we use this mechanism
why would we use callback function. We won't. Thats right. If we
choose to use this mechanism of the WaitHandle then the callback
function parameter to the BeginReceive can be null as shown here: //m_asynResult is declared of type IAsyncResult and assumming that m_socClient has made a connection. Even
though this mechanism will work fine using multiple threads, we will
for now stick to our callback mechanism where the system notifies us of
the completion of asynchronous operation which is Receive in this case . BeginReceive(m_DataBuffer,0,m_DataBuffer.Length,SocketFlags.None, pfnCallBack,null); But
before you access the buffer you need to call EndReceive() function on
the socket. The EndReceive will return the number of bytes received .
Its not legal to access the buffer before calling EndReceive. MULTIPLE SOCKETS Now lets say you have two sockets connecting to either two different servers
or same server(which is valid) . One way is to create two different
delegates and attach a different delegate to different BeginReceive
function. What if you have 3 sockets or for that matter n sockets ,
this approach of creating multiple delegates does not fit well in such
cases. So the solution should be to use only one delegate callback. But
then the problem is how do we know what socket completed the operation. Fortunately
there is a better solution. If you look at the BeginReceive function
again, the last parameter is a state is an object. You can pass
anything here . And whatever you pass here will be passed back to you
later as the part of parameter to the callback function. Actually this
object will be passed to you later as a IAsyncResult.AsyncState. So
when your callback gets called, you can use this information to
identify the socket that completed the operation. Since you can pass
any thing to this last parameter, we can pass a class object that
contains as much information as we want. For example we can declare a
class as follows: public class CSocketPacket and call BeginReceive as follows: CSocketPacket theSocPkt = new CSocketPacket (); and in the callback function we can get the data like this: public void OnDataReceived(IAsyncResult asyn) To see the whole application download the code and you can see the code. If
you have understood whatever I have described so far, you will easily
understand the Server part of the socket application. So far we have
been talking about a client making connection to a server and sending
and receiving data. On the
Server end, the application has to send and receive data. But in
addition to adding and receiving data, server has to allow the clients
to make connections by listening at some port. Server does not need to
know client I.P. addresses. It really does not care where the client is
because its not the server but client who is responsible for making
connection. Server's responsibility is to manage client connections. public Socket m_socListener; If
you look at the above code carefully you will see that its similar to
we did in the asynchronous client. First of all the we need to create a
listening socket and bind it to a local IP address. Note that we have
given Any as the IPAddress . I will explain what it means later. and
also we have passed port number as 8221. Next we made a call to Listen
function. The 4 is a parameter indicating backlog indicating the maximum length of the queue of pending connections. Next
we made a call to BeginAccept passing it a delegate callback.
BeginAccept is a non-blocking method that returns immediately and
when a client has made requested a connection, the callback routine is
called and you can accept the connection by calling EndAccept. The
EndAccept returns a socket object which represents the incoming
connection. Here is the code for the callback delegate: public void OnClientConnect(IAsyncResult asyn) Here we accept the connection and call WaitForData which in turn calls BeginReceive for the m_socWorker. Object objData = txtDataTx.Text; Here is how our client looks like Here is how our server looks like That is all there is to the socket programming.
(Page 1 of 2 )
This
is the second part of Ashish's two part series about handling sockets
in the C# language. Read this article to learn how to use sockets with
the .Net framework.This is the second
part of the previous article about the socket programming. In the
earlier article we created a client but that client used to make
blocking IO calls ( Receive ) to read data at regular intervals (via
clicking the Rx button). But as I said in my earlier article, that
model does not work very well in a real world application. Also since
Windows is an events-based system, the application (client) should get
notifications of some kind whenever the data is received so that client
can read it rather than client continuously polling for data.
Socket Programming in C# - Part II - Article
(Page 2 of 2 )
BeginReceive
When the callback function is called it means that the BeginReceive function completed which means that the data has arrived.
The callback function needs to have the following signature:
m_asynResult = m_socClient.BeginReceive(m_DataBuffer,0,m_DataBuffer.Length,SocketFlags.None,null,null);
if ( m_asynResult.AsyncWaitHandle.WaitOne () )
{
int iRx = 0 ;
iRx = m_socClient.EndReceive (m_asynResult);
char[] chars = new char[iRx + 1];
System.Text.Decoder d = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetDecoder();
int charLen = d.GetChars(m_DataBuffer, 0, iRx, chars, 0);
System.String szData = new System.String(chars);
txtDataRx.Text = txtDataRx.Text + szData;
}
Lets
say we made the call to BeginReceive and after some time the data
arrived and our callback function got called.Now question is where's
the data? The data is now available in the buffer that you passed as
the first parameter while making call to BeginReceive() method . In the
following example the data will be available in m_DataBuffer :
To put it all together look at the following simple code:
IAsyncResult m_asynResult;
public AsyncCallback pfnCallBack ;
public Socket m_socClient;
// create the socket...
public void OnConnect()
{
m_socClient = new Socket (AddressFamily.InterNetwork,SocketType.Stream ,ProtocolType.Tcp );
// get the remote IP address...
IPAddress ip = IPAddress.Parse ("10.10.120.122");
int iPortNo = 8221;
//create the end point
IPEndPoint ipEnd = new IPEndPoint (ip.Address,iPortNo);
//connect to the remote host...
m_socClient.Connect ( ipEnd );
//watch for data ( asynchronously )...
WaitForData();
}
public void WaitForData()
{
if ( pfnCallBack == null )
pfnCallBack = new AsyncCallback (OnDataReceived);
// now start to listen for any data...
m_asynResult =
m_socClient.BeginReceive (m_DataBuffer,0,m_DataBuffer.Length,SocketFlags.None, pfnCallBack,null);
}
public void OnDataReceived(IAsyncResult asyn)
{
//end receive...
int iRx = 0 ;
iRx = m_socClient.EndReceive (asyn);
char[] chars = new char[iRx + 1];
System.Text.Decoder d = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetDecoder();
int charLen = d.GetChars(m_DataBuffer, 0, iRx, chars, 0);
System.String szData = new System.String(chars);
WaitForData();
}
The OnConnect function makes a connection to the server
and then makes a call to WaitForData. WaitForData creates the callback
function and makes a call to BeginReceive passing a global buffer and
the callback function. When data arrives the OnDataReceive is called
and the m_socClient's EndReceive is called which returns the number of
bytes received and then the data is copied over to a string and a new
call is made to WaitForData which will call BeginReceive again and so
on. This works fine if you have one socket in you application.
{
public System.Net.Sockets.Socket thisSocket;
public byte[] dataBuffer = new byte[1024];
}
theSocPkt.thisSocket = m_socClient;
// now start to listen for any data...
m_asynResult
= m_socClient.BeginReceive (theSocPkt.dataBuffer
,0,theSocPkt.dataBuffer.Length ,
SocketFlags.None,pfnCallBack,theSocPkt);
{
try
{
CSocketPacket theSockId = (CSocketPacket)asyn.AsyncState ;
//end receive...
int iRx = 0 ;
iRx = theSockId.thisSocket.EndReceive (asyn);
char[] chars = new char[iRx + 1];
System.Text.Decoder d = System.Text.Encoding.UTF8.GetDecoder();
int charLen = d.GetChars(theSockId.dataBuffer, 0, iRx, chars, 0);
System.String szData = new System.String(chars);
txtDataRx.Text = txtDataRx.Text + szData;
WaitForData();
}
catch (ObjectDisposedException )
{
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Log(0,"1","\nOnDataReceived: Socket has been closed\n");
}
catch(SocketException se)
{
MessageBox.Show (se.Message );
}
}
There
is one thing which you may be wondering about. When you call
BeginReceive , you have to pass a buffer and the number of bytes to
receive. The question here is how big should the buffer be. Well, the
answer is it depends. You can have a very small buffer size say, 10
bytes long and if there are 20 bytes ready to be read, then you would
require 2 calls to receive the data. On the other hand if you specify
the length as 1024 and you know you are always going to receive data in
10-byte chunks you are unnecessarily wasting memory. So the length
depends upon your application.
Server Side
On
the server side there has to be one socket called the Listener socket
that listens at a specific port number for client connections. When the
client makes a connection, the server needs to accept the connection
and then in order for the server to send and receive data from that
connected client it needs to talk to that client through the socket
that it got when it accepted the connection . Following code
illustrates how server listens to the connections and accepts the
connection:
public void StartListening()
{
try
{
//create the listening socket...
m_socListener = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork,SocketType.Stream,ProtocolType.Tcp);
IPEndPoint ipLocal = new IPEndPoint ( IPAddress.Any ,8221);
//bind to local IP Address...
m_socListener.Bind( ipLocal );
//start listening...
m_socListener.Listen (4);
// create the call back for any client connections...
m_socListener.BeginAccept(new AsyncCallback ( OnClientConnect ),null);
cmdListen.Enabled = false;
}
catch(SocketException se)
{
MessageBox.Show ( se.Message );
}
}
{
try
{
m_socWorker = m_socListener.EndAccept (asyn);
WaitForData(m_socWorker);
}
catch(ObjectDisposedException)
{
System.Diagnostics.Debugger.Log(0,"1","\n OnClientConnection: Socket has been closed\n");
}
catch(SocketException se)
{
MessageBox.Show ( se.Message );
}
}
If we want to send data some data to client we use m_socWorker socket for that purpose like this:
byte[] byData = System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(objData.ToString ());
m_socWorker.Send (byData);
- Socket Programming in C# (0)2007/07/27
- Network Programming in C# (0)2007/07/27
- IOCP Thread Pooling in C# (0)2007/07/26
- UDP 프로그래밍의 기초 (0)2007/05/14
- ICMP 프로그래밍 (0)2007/05/14

수안이의 컴퓨터 연구실






Leave your greetings.