How to create WPF internet chat application

Question

I want to create a simple chat application using C# and WPF that uses internet to connect between clients and server. I found a lot of tutorials for chat apps, but they all work over local network, I am confused and don't know to what technology to use to create my app. Could anybody point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

You really have a lot of directions you can go for this. The simplest is a simple plain sockets client-server star topography. This will work over both a public and private network, but you will encounter data theft as the data will be unencrypted.

For any internet application, you really should use the SslStream to secure your communications between the server and client. This allows you to specify TLS1.2 as your transport which will provide great security. You can consume that server stream from WPF via standard Sockets or from Windows Store Apps using StreamSockets. Mind you, you will need to learn a LOT about how SSL keys work and configuring the connections in code.