I have a VB.NET project that uses serial comms to communicate with some equipment made by my company. It is a simple point-to-point link using RS-232, not RS-485 or anything like that. It means that the PC connected to the equipment is no more than a few feet away.

I would like to upgrade this so I can use a different communication method that allows a remote PC to be attached. Does TCP/IP sound like a good candidate? Unfortunately, I have no clue where to start as I have no experience with this. From what I have read, TCP Clients and TCP Listeners seem to fit the bill.
My intention is to use VB2005 or C#2005.

In my serial comms app, I send a command of a few bytes to the equipment, and it responds with anything up to 800 bytes or so. I need to respond to the comm events and build up a byte array, and then present the array to the rest of the app when it is complete.

A few questions:
How does TCP work - will I receive data in one go, or will it arrive chunk by chunk, as per serial comms?
Is there a fixed packet size?
If a transmission error occurs, and retransmission is required, does TCP handle this itself?

I'm sure I will have more questions in the future.


All comments and advice welcome.

Thanks!