Book Image

Hands-On Network Programming with C# and .NET Core

By : Sean Burns
Book Image

Hands-On Network Programming with C# and .NET Core

By: Sean Burns

Overview of this book

The C# language and the .NET Core application framework provide the tools and patterns required to make the discipline of network programming as intuitive and enjoyable as any other aspect of C# programming. With the help of this book, you will discover how the C# language and the .NET Core framework make this possible. The book begins by introducing the core concepts of network programming, and what distinguishes this field of programming from other disciplines. After this, you will gain insights into concepts such as transport protocols, sockets and ports, and remote data streams, which will provide you with a holistic understanding of how network software fits into larger distributed systems. The book will also explore the intricacies of how network software is implemented in a more explicit context, by covering sockets, connection strategies such as Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP), asynchronous processing, and threads. You will then be able to work through code examples for TCP servers, web APIs served over HTTP, and a Secure Shell (SSH) client. By the end of this book, you will have a good understanding of the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) network stack, the various communication protocols for that stack, and the skills that are essential to implement those protocols using the C# programming language and the .NET Core framework.
Table of Contents (26 chapters)
Free Chapter
1
Section 1: Foundations of Network Architecture
6
Section 2: Communicating Over Networks
10
Section 3: Application Protocols and Connection Handling
15
Section 4: Security, Stability, and Scalability
21
Section 5: Advanced Subjects

Asynchronous programming for asynchronous data sources

If you're not familiar with asynchronous programming then what we're about to talk about may seem a little confusing at first, but I promise that in practice, it's actually quite simple. All it means is performing individual computational tasks out of order, or out of sync. It allows engineers to defer blocking the execution of their program to wait for a long-running task until they absolutely have to. To make this clear, let's look at an example.

Let's imagine we have a method that must have step A send a request for a massive amount of data, with step B performing long-running calculations locally, and finally, C returns the two results as a single response. If we were to read the response from our network request synchronously, then the time it takes to complete our method would be the total of...