EASY NETWORKING CLASSES

EasyTCPSocket: This class allows you to establish connections and communicate via the messaging protocol with a remote machine. The main difference between the EasyTCPSocket class and a regular TCPSocket class is the message-based aspects of the protocol. The connection process is identical to a regular TCPSocket. However, when you want to send data to a remote machine you must use the SendMessage method to do so. If you are on the receiving end of a message, you will get the ReceivedMessage event.

For your synchronous listening needs, there is a WaitForConnection method which will synchronously wait for a predetermined amount of time for a connection to be established. If the connection is made, it returns true, otherwise, it returns false. Note that we call App.DoEvents internally so that your application’s UI will stay responsive during this call. Also for your synchronous needs, we added the WaitForMessage method. This method will wait for a message to come in with the command ID you specify. Once that message comes in, we will return the string data portion of that message. If a message comes in with a command ID that is different from the one you are expecting, we will drop that message. Note that this method internally calls App.DoEvents, so your UI will stay responsive.

EasyUDPSocket: This class allows you to easily communicate with the UDP protocol using unicasting, multicasting or broadcasting. Like the EasyTCPSocket class, this class is based around the simple messaging protocol described above. You can send message to either an individual, or to an entire group.

One main benefit to the EasyUDPSocket class is the way we handle multicasting. Everyone has a hard time remembering what IP addresses can be used with multicasting. It’s a bother to try to look up what a “Class D” IP address is. So we made it simple on you: you don’t have to use one if you don’t want to. You can pass any string you would like as a groupName parameter and we will change it into a proper multicasting IP address for you.

This means that you can pass “My Awesome Application” in as the parameter to Register and use that same string for calls to SendMessageToGroup. You can still pass in a valid Class D IP address; we will honor them. One other helper function is the Bind function. This sets up the socket for your properly (so you don’t have to set .RouterHops or .SendToSelf up yourself) and does the bind on the port specified.

One thing to keep in mind is that we default to having .SendToSelf on. You are welcome to override this default yourself by setting SendToSelf to false after the making the .Bind call. While you can still call [Join/Leave]MulticastGroup, we suggest that you only use Register and Unregister for your application.

AutoDiscovery: The AutoDiscovery class does exactly as the name implies; it lets you automatically discover other applications on the local network. It does so by checking to see what other applications are using the same group name that you pass in to the Register function. When a member joins (this includes your application when you first call .Register), you will get a MemberJoined event with the IP address of the member that joined. When a member leaves, then you get a MemberLeft event with their IP as well.

If you would like a list of the currently connected members, you can get an array of their IPs back by calling GetMemberList. If you’re worried about your member list getting stagnant (due to computer’s crashing, etc), you can always call the UpdateMemberList method which will clear the internal list of connected members and re-query the network for members.