Use the
TcpClient
class to connect to and converse with a
TCP-based server by passing the address and port of the server to
talk to. This example will talk to the server from Recipe 13.9:
public string RunClient(string address,int port) { string response = ""; // Set up a listener on that address/port TcpClient tcpClient = new TcpClient(address,port); if(tcpClient != null) { string message = "Hello there"; // Translate the passed message into UTF8ASCII and store it as a Byte array. byte[] bytes = Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(message); NetworkStream stream = tcpClient.GetStream( ); // Send the message to the connected TcpServer. // The write flushes the stream automatically here stream.Write(bytes, 0, bytes.Length); // Get the response from the server StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(stream,Encoding.UTF8); try { response = reader.ReadToEnd( ); } finally { // Close the reader reader.Close( ); } // Close the client tcpClient.Close( ); } // Return the response text return response; }
RunClient
is designed to send one message
containing “Hello World” to the
server, get the response and return it as a string, then terminate.
To accomplish this, it creates the TcpClient
on
the address and port passed in, and then it gets the bytes for the
string using the Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes
method.
Once it has the bytes to send, it gets the
NetworkStream
from the
TcpClient
by calling the
GetStream
method and
sends the message using the Write
method.
In order to receive the response from the server, the blocking
ReadToEnd
method is then called. Once
ReadToEnd
returns, the string contains the
response.