Tutor.com Classroom How-To #3: specifying "End-Of-Message" to a TCP/IP listener

These How-To tips are taken from The Tutor.com Classroom: Architecture and techniques using Silverlight, WPF, and the Microsoft .NET Framework.

You can check out the Silverlight Tutor.com Classroom in "practice" mode, although the real experience is with a live tutor on the other side!

Since a TCP/IP Listener is constantly in a listening state, the Listener needs to know when to act on the bytes received. To accomplish this, listen first for 8 ASCII bytes that represent two 32-bit integers specifying the number of bytes the sender is sending, and then continue listening until receiving this number of bytes. This is an easier solution to implement than using a delimiter to specify end-of-message, since you don’t have to worry about delimiter escaping, and since you can specify the exact number of bytes to listen for via the third parameter to SocketAsyncEventArgs.SetBuffer().