Question

I have a C# (.net 3.5) desktop application which prints out some numbers on the screen. Now I would like to extend this to a mobile device. (Android device in my case.) It has to display the same numbers as on the computer screen. The whole thing is just a proof of concept, it doesn’t have to look nice, it doesn’t have to work 100%, have a nice GUI or easy setup, it just has to display some numbers.

I have been looking into MonoDroid, as it has the potential to use a WCF service. (I know the mobile device and the desktop computer will be connected to the same network.) Unfortunately MonoDroid’s trial version doesn’t support a real device and I don’t want to spend a few hundred bucks just to prove a point.

I have a basic knowledge of Java, and I think I am able to quickly develop a sample application with the Android SDK to fetch data from a web page on the network, interpret it (XML, JSON, whatever) and display it on the screen.

So my question becomes: is it possible to, from within an existing application, create some kind of web service (without setting up an entire IIS server) that contains a web page with some XML data that I can refresh at a given interval and is accessible from a computer on the same network? How should I do this, which technology to use?

Or are there alternative ways to achieve something like this?

Answer 1

I use a C# HttpListener as follows…

private void CreateListener
{
    HttpListener listener = null;
    HttpListenerContext context = null;
    HttpListenerRequest request = null;
    HttpListenerResponse response = null;
    string PortNumber = "9876";
    string requestUrl;
    Boolean listen = false;

    try
    {
        if (listener == null)
        {
            listener = new HttpListener();
            listener.Prefixes.Add("http://*:" + PortNumber + "/");
            listener.Start();
            listen = true;
            while (listen)
            {
                try
                {
                    context = listener.GetContext();
                }
                catch (Exception e)
                {
                    listen = false;
                }
                if (listen)
                {
                    request = context.Request;
                    requestUrl = request.Url.ToString();

                    // Process request and/or request Url
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Basically listener.GetContext(); blocks until an HTTP request is received. You can then use request = context.Request to retrive the HTTP request data and process it. You can then use context.Response to return a response.

Fairly simple to implement and adapt.