[Csrobots-devel] Connection to the server

[Oliver A. <olli@3.1415926.org>]

Hi CSRobots developers (well, the one that isn't me... ;) ),

today I thought long and hard about how to implement the base class for
CSRobot Orders and found a little problem.
Orders can be divided into several ty<pes:
 - Orders which will only be sent to ther server without a response
 - Orders which will generate exactly one response
 - Orders with two or more response-objects from the server
plus:
 - "responses" from the server without any orders - server pushing of som=
e
kind of information

Our current scheme (send object the read object) is doing perfectly for
the first two kinds, but dramatically fails with the latter two. The
reason is: we currently have got a half-duplex connection to the server.
The client can send data and the server can respond only after it receive=
d
an order.

Thus, we need a full duplex connection to the server. The first idea I ha=
d
was establishing another half duplex connection to the server - this bear=
s
the same problems FTP does have and generally seems to be a bad idea.
Fortunately Microsoft supplied us with the Socket.Select which seems to b=
e
a solution to the problem.

So, my primary concern is: When we have a full duplex connection between
client and server we have to cache data in buffers on both sides. We need
an incoming and an outgoing queue for objects to send / objects that were
received. These need to be synchronized as we will have one further threa=
d
(on both sides of communication) just for doing the communication. .NET
provides Queue.Synchronitze() to get a synchronized handler for a Queue.
Does this extension to our current model bear any risks I can't see?

Olli
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