Windows Phone 8.1 IRC

Question

I've been trying to make an IRC client for my Windows Phone 8.1 app, and I was lucky enough to find a really good tutorial. Unfortunately the tutorial was for WP 7 and as of WP 8.1 MS changed it to runtime apps, meaning SocketAsyncEvents is unavailable to me (even though MSDN says it supports Windows Phone 8.1).

public void SendToServer(string message)
{
    var asyncEvent = new SocketAsyncEventArgs { RemoteEndPoint = new DnsEndPoint(server, serverPort) };

    var buffer = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(message + Environment.NewLine);
    asyncEvent.SetBuffer(buffer, 0, buffer.Length);

    connection.SendAsync(asyncEvent);
}

Digging around I found that the sockets were moved to Windows.Networking.Sockets, but yet none of them contained SocketAsyncEvents .

I'm pretty much unable to go any further from here, does anybody have an idea on how to convert said function to something that would work with WP 8.1?

Answer 1

Here goes!

After a lot of research this is what I found:

First of all we got a connect method.

private readonly StreamSocket _clientSocket;
private bool _connected;
private DataReader _dataReader;
public string Hostname {
    get;
    set;
}
public int Port {
    get;
    set;
}
public Credentials Credentials;
public readonly string Channel;

public async Task < bool > Connect() {
    if (_connected) return false;
    var hostname = new HostName(Hostname);
    await _clientSocket.ConnectAsync(hostname, Port.ToString());
    _connected = true;
    _dataReader = new DataReader(_clientSocket.InputStream) {
        InputStreamOptions = InputStreamOptions.Partial
    };
    ReadData();
    return true;

}

To read the data we receive through the StreamSocket, we create a ReadData() method and make it recursive so we will continue to get the data:

async private void ReadData() {
    if (!_connected || _clientSocket == null) return;
    uint s = await _dataReader.LoadAsync(2048);
    string data = _dataReader.ReadString(s);
    if (data.Contains("No ident response")) SendIdentity();
    if (Regex.IsMatch(data, "PING :[0-9]+\\r\\n")) ReplyPong(data);
    ReadData();
}

Now we have two new methods, SendIdentity(); and ReplyPong(string message); Usually the IRC server will ping you, here you have to reply with a pong, like so:

private void ReplyPong(string message) {
    var pingCode = Regex.Match(message, "[0-9]+");
    SendRawMessage("PONG :" + pingCode);
}

And we also have to send our identity when the server is ready for it, like so:

private void SendIdentity() {
    if (Credentials.Nickname == string.Empty) Credentials.Nickname = Credentials.Username;
    SendRawMessage("NICK " + Credentials.Nickname);
    SendRawMessage("USER " + Credentials.Username + " " + Credentials.Username + " " + Credentials.Username + " :" + Credentials.Username);
    if (Credentials.Password != String.Empty) SendRawMessage("PASS " + Credentials.Password);
}
public class Credentials {
    public string Nickname {
        get;
        set;
    }
    public string Username {
        get;
        set;
    }
    public string Password {
        get;
        set;
    }

    public Credentials(string username, string password = "", string nickname = "") {
        Username = username;
        Password = password;
        Nickname = nickname;
    }
}

At last we have our SendRawMessage(); method, that sends data to the server.

async private void SendRawMessage(string message) {
    var writer = new DataWriter(_clientSocket.OutputStream);
    writer.WriteString(message + "\r\n");
    await writer.StoreAsync();
    await writer.FlushAsync();
    writer.DetachStream();
    if (!_closing) return;
    _clientSocket.DisposeSafe();
    _connected = false;
}

Almost forgot out dispose function, which you can call when you want to close the stream :)

public void Dispose()
{
     SendRawMessage("QUIT :");
     _closing = true;
}

This will send a last message indicating that we're leaving, and since _closing now is true, the stream will be disposed afterwards.