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Asked: 2026-05-25T00:29:01+00:00

I’m getting into socket programming on C#.net for the project I am writing. The

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I’m getting into socket programming on C#.net for the project I am writing.

The project will be a multi-client system of which the client services monitor system resources and report back to a central server(s).

I was looking into Remoting, WCF etc. to determine which would be best for me. I settled with socket programming because of a number of requirements:

  • Sockets are faster than the rest with little overhead
  • I can support more connections per resources on the servers
  • Sockets can, with albeit modifications, allow me to interact with UNIX based systems also.
  • I can implement encryption on the link myself in code without having to rely on an SSL cert.

I may be wrong in my thinking here? If I am please do tell. Some suggest WCF as it is “wasy to use” and does everything I want but I believe it is that much slower with overheads.

My main issue is, that while the client machine will not keep a connection open, there could be thousands, or tens of thousands, of client machines and I would have to assume that the machine will be hammered with connections. Considering minimum times between connections, per client, may be as small as 1 min.

Now to my problem at hand: How to send multiple objects over the link and more importantly how to determine what they are on the other side?

I’m assuming this is possible over one connection as I have read a number of articles saying so, albeit they describe the methods differently and so are the examples.

The issue is I can’t find any example that actually does this. No example shows how to send multiple objects and then how to determine what they are on the other side.

Can anyone help me here or point me to examples. I’m quite able to figure stuff out once I have a base to work from.

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  1. Editorial Team

    It feels like the classic case of premature optimization and reinventing the wheel. I might be mistaken because I don’t know what are your performance requirements, development resources and time frame. But I suspect that very smart people had the same problems before you. And they came up with the variety of solutions, including HTTP (SOAP, REST) and XMPP (if you want statefull protocol). A lot can be done to improve performance even at the app level (minimizing amount of data send over wire, caching etc). Without complexity overhead introduced by using sockets directly. You probably know all of this but I highly recommend you to evaluate your decision again.

    As to usual serialization format suspects like XML and JSON you might also want to look at Protocol Buffers:

    protocol buffers is the name of the binary serialization format used
    by Google for much of their data communications. It is designed to be:

    • small in size – efficient data storage (far smaller than xml)
    • cheap to process – both at the client and server
    • platform independent – portable between different programming architectures
    • extensible – to add new data to old messages
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