Question

Why do we need Reader/Writer Streams while Using TCPListner in C# networking?

example :

TcpClient client = server.AcceptTcpClient(); client.ReceiveTimeout = 75000; Stream s = client.GetStream(); StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(s); StreamWriter writer = new StreamWriter(s); writer.AutoFlush = true; 

Answer 1

You only need StreamReader/StreamWriter if you want to deal with text instead of binary data.

Sockets deal with binary data naturally, which is why TcpClient exposes a Stream. Stream is a binary abstraction, hence its Read/Write methods deal in byte arrays. TextReader/TextWriter (from which StreamReader/StreamWriter are derived) deal with text – their methods deal with strings and char arrays.

StreamReader/StreamWriter basically wrap a stream and do the conversion (via an Encoding) between text and binary data for you.