Asynchronous sockets in C#
- by IVlad
I'm confused about the correct way of using asynchronous socket methods in C#. I will refer to these two articles to explain things and ask my questions: MSDN article on asynchronous client sockets and devarticles.com article on socket programming.
My question is about the BeginReceive() method. The MSDN article uses these two functions to handle receiving data:
private static void Receive(Socket client)
{
try
{
// Create the state object.
StateObject state = new StateObject();
state.workSocket = client;
// Begin receiving the data from the remote device.
client.BeginReceive( state.buffer, 0, StateObject.BufferSize, 0,
new AsyncCallback(ReceiveCallback), state);
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
}
}
private static void ReceiveCallback( IAsyncResult ar )
{
try
{
// Retrieve the state object and the client socket
// from the asynchronous state object.
StateObject state = (StateObject) ar.AsyncState;
Socket client = state.workSocket;
// Read data from the remote device.
int bytesRead = client.EndReceive(ar);
if (bytesRead > 0)
{
// There might be more data, so store the data received so far.
state.sb.Append(Encoding.ASCII.GetString(state.buffer,0,bytesRead));
// Get the rest of the data.
client.BeginReceive(state.buffer,0,StateObject.BufferSize,0,
new AsyncCallback(ReceiveCallback), state);
}
else
{
// All the data has arrived; put it in response.
if (state.sb.Length > 1)
{
response = state.sb.ToString();
}
// Signal that all bytes have been received.
receiveDone.Set();
}
}
catch (Exception e)
{
Console.WriteLine(e.ToString());
}
}
While the devarticles.com tutorial passes null for the last parameter of the BeginReceive method, and goes on to explain that the last parameter is useful when we're dealing with multiple sockets. Now my questions are:
What is the point of passing a state to the BeginReceive method if we're only working with a single socket? Is it to avoid using a class field? It seems like there's little point in doing it, but maybe I'm missing something.
How can the state parameter help when dealing with multiple sockets? If I'm calling client.BeginReceive(...), won't all the data be read from the client socket? The devarticles.com tutorial makes it sound like in this call:
m_asynResult = m_socClient.BeginReceive (theSocPkt.dataBuffer,0,theSocPkt.dataBuffer.Length, SocketFlags.None,pfnCallBack,theSocPkt);
Data will be read from the theSocPkt.thisSocket socket, instead of from the m_socClient socket. In their example the two are one and the same, but what happens if that is not the case?
I just don't really see where that last argument is useful or at least how it helps with multiple sockets. If I have multiple sockets, I still need to call BeginReceive on each of them, right?
