Gurus
I didn't personally encounter these problems but some friends of mine
who are doing some deep heavy-metal C#/Networking application have run
into these problems. Does anybody have any idea if these are
addressed for a future release?
thanks
--Dilip
Problem report:
================
1) If you put a socket into non-blocking mode, you cannot retrieve the
local and the remote endpoint. (The LocalEndpoint and RemoteEndpoint
attributes are null when you read them.) To fix, you have to use
platform invoke for getsockname() and getpeername(), which is messy.
2) Poll() blocks indefinitely if you pass a negative timeout (as it
should). On the other hand, Select() silently treats a negative
timeout the same as a zero timeout. The closest thing to a blocking
Select() you can do is to pass IntMax. However, that gives you only
about 5 and a half minutes, then the call times out. The work-around
(restarting the select if it times out) is surprisingly complicated.
3) To set the receive or send timeout, you have to pass the timeout in
milliseconds. However, Select() expects the timeout in microseconds.
Not nice.
4) Reading from a non-blocking socket when no data is available
doesn't return zero bytes but throws an exception instead. That's a
royal pain: the exception that is thrown is SocketException, so there
is no way to specifically handle timeouts. Instead, you have to get
the underlying Win32 exception, read the error code, and see whether
it is WSAEWOULDBLOCK. To boot, there are no definitions for the
various error codes in the .NET framework, so you end up grepping
through the Windows header files and have to put manifest constants
into the code. And, of course, the whole design is broken because
having to handle an exception for something that isn't an error
condition makes a mess of the code.
