visual studio 2008

Creating a chat application using Socket in Silverlight

Posted on April 17, 2008. Filed under: C#, chat application, ruby, silverlight, socket, visual studio 2008 |

Here I will explain how to communicate with the server using the Socket class. The socket class allows Asynchronous communication between the client and server. This application will show how to share data in real-time in two different browser windows using Silverlight.

This application will contain two parts:

Server application using Ruby.
Client application using C# in Silverlight.

Creating the server application:

Making a multi-threaded server application in ruby is really easy and that is the reason I chose Ruby to create the server in least amount of time possible.

require 'socket'
  
HOST = 'localhost'
PORT = 4505
  
server = TCPServer.new(HOST, PORT)
  
# array to store all the active connections
sessions = []
while (session = server.accept)
  # push the current session(socket) in the array
  sessions << session
  # initialize a new thead for each connection
  Thread.new(session) do |local_session|
    # each time a client sends some data send it to all the connections
    while(true)
      data = local_session.gets
      sessions.each do |s| 
        begin
          s.puts data
        rescue Errno::ECONNRESET
          # an exception is raised, that means the connection to the client is broken
          sessions.delete(s)
        end
      end
    end
  end
end