Windows phone 7 TCP network client

Question

Basically, I've written a windows phone 7 client, which is supposed to receive a very long string from the server. However, there seem to be some limitations on the phone networking code, and am having trouble figuring out how to do this. The following is the code I am using:

public string Receive()
    {
        string response = "Operation Timeout";
        StringBuilder content = new StringBuilder();

        // We are receiving over an established socket connection
        if (_socket != null)
        {
            // Create SocketAsyncEventArgs context object
            SocketAsyncEventArgs socketEventArg = new SocketAsyncEventArgs();
            socketEventArg.RemoteEndPoint = _socket.RemoteEndPoint;

            // Setup the buffer to receive the data
            socketEventArg.SetBuffer(new Byte[MAX_BUFFER_SIZE], 0, MAX_BUFFER_SIZE);

            // Inline event handler for the Completed event.
            // Note: This even handler was implemented inline in order to make this method self-contained.
            socketEventArg.Completed += new EventHandler<SocketAsyncEventArgs>(delegate(object s, SocketAsyncEventArgs e)
            {
                if (e.SocketError == SocketError.Success)
                {
                        response = Encoding.UTF8.GetString(e.Buffer, e.Offset, e.BytesTransferred);
                        response = response.Trim('\0');
                }
                else
                {
                    response = e.SocketError.ToString();
                }

                _clientDone.Set();
            });

            // Sets the state of the event to nonsignaled, causing threads to block
            _clientDone.Reset();

            // Make an asynchronous Receive request over the socket
            _socket.ReceiveAsync(socketEventArg);

            // Block the UI thread for a maximum of TIMEOUT_MILLISECONDS milliseconds.
            // If no response comes back within this time then proceed
            _clientDone.WaitOne(TIMEOUT_MILLISECONDS);
        }
        else
        {
            response = "Socket is not initialized";
        }

        return response;
    }

As it stands, this will only accept the first N bytes of the message and return that... any help on how to do this would be greatly appreciated! Thanks!

Answer 1

Firstly, I would try to redesign your code to be appropriately async - working round the fact that WP7 doesn't offer synchronous IO by building your own isn't nearly as clean as embracing the asynchrony.

Secondly, you're assuming that you only need a single ReceiveAsync call to get the whole data. Assuming your using TCP, that's a stream-based protocol. You'll need to either add some sort of delimiter or length prefix, or keep reading until the other side closes the connection if that's the way your protocol works.

(Any reason you're not doing this with HTTP and WebClient or WebRequest , by the way?)

Answer 2

Firstly, I would try to redesign your code to be appropriately async - working round the fact that WP7 doesn't offer synchronous IO by building your own isn't nearly as clean as embracing the asynchrony.

Secondly, you're assuming that you only need a single ReceiveAsync call to get the whole data. Assuming your using TCP, that's a stream-based protocol. You'll need to either add some sort of delimiter or length prefix, or keep reading until the other side closes the connection if that's the way your protocol works.

(Any reason you're not doing this with HTTP and WebClient or WebRequest, by the way?)