Question

I have started looking into developing an in browser application on the silverlight framework.

I need to perform socket communication over UDP using the socket class in the System.Net.Sockets namespace.

Unfortunately, I am not able to see the ProtocolType option choice for UDP when creating a new socket object.

Which class library do I use then for udp socket communication? All I want to do is to be able to send udp packets to a set of IP addresses in an iterative fashion – send a udp packet to one ip address and wait for a response, if any, and the go to the next.

Please advice.

Thanks in advance,

Subbu

Answer 1

You can send unicast udp packets to sources outside the local network and you can send and receive multicast udp packets inside the local network (because multicast network support usually ends beyond the local network).

You cannot receive unicast udp packets from anywhere.

There are also some security restrictions similar to the ones you know for web requests.

That makes udp support in Silverlight very limited and there is no Silverlight library you can use to get around that.

You can also call win32 libraries with P/Invoke if your Silverlight 5 application runs with elevated permissions or, maybe easier to do, have an external application in the local network that serves as a proxy for udp traffic and communicates with the Silverlight client through udp multicast.