Question

I am making a dual app with android and kinect. I want to be able to send notifications to the android app from the kinect. I was told that the best way to accomplish this is to set up a simple tcp server. I tried to set it up by using the tutorial at this <link>. The tutorial however isn’t descriptive enough for me and I am unable to make it work. The guy who posted it basically posted several pieces of code without any instruction about assembling them. I need someone to either walk me through setting up this server or I need a link to a detailed tutorial. I have searched the web myself for hours but I haven’t found anything useful, which is why I’m asking here.

Answer 1

Here’s what I thought he was saying to do in that tutorial:

using System;
using System.Text;
using System.Net.Sockets;
using System.Threading;
using System.Net;

namespace TCPServerTutorial
{
  class Server
  {
    private TcpListener tcpListener;
    private Thread listenThread;

    public Server()
    {
      this.tcpListener = new TcpListener(IPAddress.Any, 3000);
      this.listenThread = new Thread(new ThreadStart(ListenForClients));
      this.listenThread.Start();
    }


    private void HandleClientComm(object client)
    {
      TcpClient tcpClient = (TcpClient)client;
      NetworkStream clientStream = tcpClient.GetStream();

      byte[] message = new byte[4096];
      int bytesRead;

      while (true)
      {
        bytesRead = 0;

        try
        {
          //blocks until a client sends a message
          bytesRead = clientStream.Read(message, 0, 4096);
        }
        catch
        {
          //a socket error has occured
          break;
        }

        if (bytesRead == 0)
        {
          //the client has disconnected from the server
          break;
        }

        //message has successfully been received
        ASCIIEncoding encoder = new ASCIIEncoding();
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(encoder.GetString(message, 0, bytesRead));
      }

      tcpClient.Close();
    }

    private void ListenForClients()
    {
      this.tcpListener.Start();

      while (true)
      {
        //blocks until a client has connected to the server
        TcpClient client = this.tcpListener.AcceptTcpClient();

        //create a thread to handle communication
        //with connected client
        Thread clientThread = new Thread(new ParameterizedThreadStart(HandleClientComm));
        clientThread.Start(client);
      }
    }

    //you'll have to find a way to pass this arg
    private void SendBack(TcpClient tcpClient)
    {
    NetworkStream clientStream = tcpClient.GetStream();
    ASCIIEncoding encoder = new ASCIIEncoding();
    byte[] buffer = encoder.GetBytes("Hello Client!");

    clientStream.Write(buffer, 0 , buffer.Length);
    clientStream.Flush();
    }
  }
}

But that’s just me. He only ever talked about one class, so it is logical to assume all his functions are in that class.

For the client code, he pretty much just gives you the code for a function (in C#, of course) which will send some bytes to an IP address (aka, the IP of the machine your server is running on). You could put this function in any C# class and call it in whatever way you wish. He has hard coded the IP address and the message to send, but these could easily be arguments passed to the function.

private void SendToServer(){
    TcpClient client = new TcpClient();

    //IP of the server: currently loopback, change to whatever you want
    IPEndPoint serverEndPoint = new IPEndPoint(IPAddress.Parse("127.0.0.1"), 3000);

    client.Connect(serverEndPoint);

    NetworkStream clientStream = client.GetStream();

    ASCIIEncoding encoder = new ASCIIEncoding();

    //Message being sent: "Hello Server!"
    byte[] buffer = encoder.GetBytes("Hello Server!");

    clientStream.Write(buffer, 0 , buffer.Length);
    clientStream.Flush();
}