TCP/IP Communications Tutorial?

[flycast]

Can anybody point me to good internet reading on doing TCP/IP programming using the different objects available in VB.NET ?

What I am looking for is a good, understandable, less technical overview that would help me sort out the different objects and how to use them together to get Ethernet and Internet communications done. From there I can dig into the details of the different objects.

Any help is appreciated...
Thanks,
Eric

[jwebster03]

I've done extensive programming with network communications using .net and have wrote several differen types of applications. There really is no one good article out there to help you with this. In fact, much of it is uncharted territory for many and therefore I did not find very many good readings. Even the Micrsoft Press book, "Network Programming for the .net framework" lacked the material needed.

My approach was to go through the set of classes and teach myself. If you explain what you would like to accomplish I can give you tips and perhaps provide you with some code.

[TLord]

If you want to send/receive objects, I recommend starting with .Net Remoting not Network programming.

[jwebster03]

Why in the heck would you use remoting instead of the system.net.sockets classes? Have you not used them? They are pretty powerful.

[flycast]

I have written a small app that is intended to intercept TCP/IP communications between a program already running on the PC and a terminal server connected by ethernet. The program on the pc is downloading information to the printer and when it downloads certain information I need to also download some of that information to another printer as well. I use my simple forwarding program to watch that datastream between the two.

The way my current program works is I simply have the existing program connect with the termial server using TCPClient object and listen for a connection from the PC using TCPListener object. They both return NetworkStream objects and I recieve the stream, look at it and pass it on to the other entity.

The program is working just fine but . .. I really don't like the fact that I don't understand what is really going on with all these objects. Since I don't understand the different ways I could do this I could be doing it with a very innefficient or awkward tool where some other tool may work much better.

Also, frankly, I am a curious person and would like to understand (not in minute technical detail) how these objects do what they do.

What is a TCPListener?
What is a TCPclient?
What is a NetworkStream?
What is a socket?
How are they similar? How are they different?
What cool tricks can they do?
Will they act the same on my ethernet and the internet?
Are there other objects in the vb.net package that can do the same things even better or worse?

That was the kind of thing I was hoping to learn so that this app could be as good as possible. Also I have another couple of apps to write. I was considering writing a class to handle the type of TCP/IP communication I am doing so that the code would be reusable fo all three.

Thanks for your opinions...
Eric