winsock with .NET

I have a friend that sent me a little chat program using winsock.
So, I started working on a little program as well.
His program is in VB 6, and I have VB.NET.

I got the control to work with my .NET environment, but I have noticed that a few things are different in .NET, and have been giving me tons of problems.

for example

VB Code:

Private Sub winsock_ConnectionRequest(ByVal requestID As Long)

This is the VB6 ConnectionRequest sub.

When I choose my winsock control, and find ConnectionRequest it creates this..

VB Code:

Private Sub winsock_ConnectionRequest(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As AxMSWinsockLib.DMSWinsockControlEvents_ConnectionRequestEvent) Handles winsock.ConnectionRequest

I've seen winsock.Accept requestID all over the place, but this is an error, obviously because requestID isn't defined in the sub definition. So I tried to use sender. Also, when I do this, Visual Studio.NET changes the command to winsock.Accept(sender). I dont know if this is wrong or not, but it does not work.

As of right now I'm sitting at a rather nasty error: "Exception has been thrown by the target of an invocation." This comes up from this code...

VB Code:

Try
    winsock.Accept(sender)
Catch ex As Exception
    MessageBox.Show(ex.Message)
End Try

What am I doing wrong? or where can I find a .NET example of how to use winsock?

First of all, people will tell you how bad it is to use OCX controls in .NET. They work, but it is considered a bad practice, since .NET plans to escape all that mess.

However, Microsoft has not presented us with anything as useful as winsock in .NET, and only a few client-based classes exist that implement .NET sockets, and server apps are even fewer.

Anyway, ByVal e As AxMSWinsockLib.DMSWinsockControlEvents_ConnectionRequestEvent looks like what you need to use. Just so you know, Sender is a variable that the event passes which refers directly to your Winsock object. If you put winsock.accept(blah), sender.accept(blah) would do the same.

I assume the "e" variable contains what you need. Just try typing in winsock.accept(e.) - when you type the period after the e, some methods/properties in e can be selected. I don't know how that works with it, but hopefully it will just be something like e.RequestID!

Correct, there is no Windsock control in .NET. You need to re-write most of the app that your friend sent you. It will not convert
correctly, at least 99.9% of the time. Your almost always better off re-writting the old VB6 apps in pure .NET

Check out the System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream namespace. There is a GetStream function that can use with the System.IO.StreamWritter
object to read data from the incoming stream.

Also, the System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient & Listener ;)


Ps, you might get a better response having the thread moved to VB.NET or post a link to this thread. :)

Here is a sample senddata procedure in .NET. No COM control needed.

VB Code:

Private client As TcpClient
 
Private Sub Form1_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load
    client = New TcpClient("localhost", PORT_NUM)
    'Blah, blah, blah...
    '...
End Sub
 
'Use a StreamWriter to send a message to server.
Private Sub SendData(ByVal data As String)
    Dim writer As New IO.StreamWriter(client.GetStream)
    writer.Write(data & vbCr)
    writer.Flush()
End Sub