Windows Phone 7 Sockets: The ABC (of building an IRC-client)
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The Mango-update for Windows Phone 7 is arriving soon and one of the new features from a developer’s perspective is the added support for sockets. WP7 Mango supports both the TCP and UDP protocols and to the delight of many people, its port-range hasn’t been restricted. So the Mango devices can connect to any IP address and to any port they want, as long as it’s open. This is huge thing when compared to the web-based Silverlight-platform where connections are restricted to ports 4502 – 4534.
In the coming weeks I’ll be running a set of blog posts which will describe the sockets-support from a developer’s perspective. We will go through the the most important classes in the System.Net.Sockets namespace.In addition to that we will take a look on other aspects like “sockets and tombstoning” and “how to debug sockets”.
The upcoming blog posts aren’t just about the theory. Instead we will go through of building a complete IRC-client. So the blog posts will focus on developing WP7 applications which require a long running TCP-connection which send and received text-based data.
Hope you enjoy the following series and please leave a comment if there’s anything in the socket land which you would like to be examined.
Part I: How to open a connection
Part II: How to receive a message