tags:

views:

28

answers:

1
Q: 

HttpTunneling a TCPClient application

We have a custom chat application(c#) which uses TCPClient. We are having problem on clients who are behind Firewall or proxy. We know that these client can browse the internet without a problem so we decided to change our TCPClient application so that It uses HTTP messages to communicate.

Will it be enough just to wrap our text massages with standard HTML tags and HTTP headers? We need a long lasting connection. Does keep-alive have a limit? Do firewalls or proxies have time limits for "alive" connections.

+1  A: 

You would need to change your protocol, probably pretty significantly. There's no guarantee that a proxy is going to use the same TCP connection for subsequent HTTP requests, it has the freedom to close any connection after receiving a message from the server, and they generally will after only a few idle seconds.

Unless your protocol can work stateless, then it isn't going to work over HTTP through a proxy.

Adam Ruth  2010-06-07 08:55:32
himm... our chat application needs an open connection and our server differentiates clients by their sockets then we will need to implement something to track state of clients.
 2010-06-07 12:03:29
Chat applications over HTTP (well, pretty much all applications over HTTP) us a cookie or token to keep track of clients that is passed to the client on the first connection and stored in a local database.Another thing to keep in mind is that with HTTP only the client can initiate a connection. The server can't "push" anything down, only respond to requests. So you'll need to use a polling mechanism.
Adam Ruth  2010-06-07 20:49:16

related questions

Displaying Flash content in a C# WinForms application
How to get the value of built, encoded ViewState?
Unhandled Exception Handler in .NET 1.1
How do I connect to a database and loop over a recordset in C#?
How do I most elegantly express left join with aggregate SQL as LINQ query
Get a new object instance from a Type in C#
.NET Testing Framework Advice
Automatically update version number
What is the difference between an int and an Integer in Java/C#?
How to write to Web.Config in Medium Trust ?
WinForms ComboBox data binding gotcha
How do you sort a C# dictionary by value?
Adding Scripting functionality to .NET applications
Floating Point Number parsing: Is there a Catch All algorithm?
How do I print an HTML document from a web service?
Decoding T-SQL CAST in C#/VB.net
Anatomy of a "Memory Leak"
How do I get a distinct, ordered list of names from a DataTable using Linq
Reliable Timer in a Console Application
How do I fill a DataSet or a DataTable from a LINQ query resultset ?
What's the difference between Math.Floor() and Math.Truncate() in .NET?
How do I calculate relative time?
How do I calculate someone's age in C#?
Are there any conversion tools for porting Visual J# code to C#?
When setting a form's opacity should I use a decimal or double?