Any recommendations for a socket library?

[Mark Sisson]

Hi all.
I'm an old salt VB/Com developer with now years of .Net. I was never
a heavy C++ guy but now I'm trying to get into game programming at it
seems to be the best fit.

I'm now starting to get my rudimentary network pieces going. The
client is going to run a C++ and my backend will be .Net.

My question is whether anyone had recommendations regarding socket
libraries. I have a nice book entitled "Programming Multiplayer
Games" by Mulholland Hakala that basic shows you how to do things at
the API level. But am I wasting my time try to learn the details and
instead use a library? I see a lot about ACE on the newsgroups but is
it supported? Will I find quick tutorials to get me up and running
quickly? What I'm worried about are all the "tricks of the trade" and
school or hard knocks best practices that will keep my app running
smoothly when various situations arise.

Thanks for any comments.
mark

 

[Skyler York]

Hi all.
I'm an old salt VB/Com developer with now years of .Net. I was never
a heavy C++ guy but now I'm trying to get into game programming at it
seems to be the best fit.

I'm now starting to get my rudimentary network pieces going. The
client is going to run a C++ and my backend will be .Net.

My question is whether anyone had recommendations regarding socket
libraries. I have a nice book entitled "Programming Multiplayer
Games" by Mulholland Hakala that basic shows you how to do things at
the API level. But am I wasting my time try to learn the details and
instead use a library? I see a lot about ACE on the newsgroups but is
it supported? Will I find quick tutorials to get me up and running
quickly? What I'm worried about are all the "tricks of the trade" and
school or hard knocks best practices that will keep my app running
smoothly when various situations arise.

Thanks for any comments.
mark

If it's going to use .NET, you could make use of the System.Net.*
namespace classes (namely objects in the Sockets namespace) for basic
network communication. It's not really a full networking library per
say, but it does have some basic classes like TcpClient and UdpClient
that you could use. Of course you could always resort to raw sockets.

 

[Mark Sisson]

Thanks for the reply but I'm already well versed in the System.Net.*
namespace for .Net. My problem is the C++ (non-managed code) on the
client. I chose to use C++ for the client rather than managed code
due to the large footprint of a .Net install for the client.

 

[venkat dhinakaran]

Use ACE. It is free. It gives nice frameworks like Reactor, Connector
etc. to do socket programming.
http://www.riverace.com/acebooks/index.htm
Thanks.
Dhina

 

[Lothar Werzinger]

Hi all.
I'm an old salt VB/Com developer with now years of .Net. I was never
a heavy C++ guy but now I'm trying to get into game programming at it
seems to be the best fit.

ACE http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE.html is a vary mature framework for
networked programming.

Lothar