Question

I’m developing a small online game in C#. Currently I am using simple sync TCP sockets. But now (because this is some kind of “learning project”) I want to convert to asynchronous sockets. In the client I have the method: byte[] SendAndReceive(Opcode op, byte[] data).
But when I use async sockets this isn’t possible anymore.
For example my MapManager class first checks if a map is locally in a folder (checksum) and if it isn’t, the map will be downloaded from the server.

So my question:
Is there any good way to send some data and get the answer without saving the received data to some kind of buffer and polling till this buffer isn’t null?

Answer 1

Check out IO Completion Ports and the SocketAsyncEventArgs that goes with it. It raises events when data has been transferred, but you still need a buffer. Just no polling. It’s fast and pretty efficient.

http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/83102/C-SocketAsyncEventArgs-High-Performance-Socket-Cod

and another example on MSDN

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.net.sockets.socketasynceventargs.aspx