Yet another communication system for .NET

Yacs is an abstraction over the TcpClient class from .NET designed to make communication between different application nodes simple.

using Yacs;

// Create a new Yacs hub listening on port 1234.
var hub = new Hub(1234);

// Create a new Yacs channel to connect to the hub.
var channel = new Channel("127.0.0.1", 1234);

// Send a message.
channel.Send("Hello, this is Yacs.");

Yacs:

• Allows an application to communicate directly with other nodes via TCP
• Notifies applications of incoming messages and losses of connection via standard .NET events
• Supports sending and receiving messages as strings or byte arrays

Yacs has a few advanced features, such as node discovery for local networks, but it is not intended to act as a complex communication framework – Yacs' purpose is to do just enough to save you from the tedious and repetitive work normally involved in using TCP in .NET.

For basic usage you only need the classes in the namespace Yacs. So:

using Yacs;

A Yacs hub can be used to accept channel connections, and can be instantiated as follows:

var hub = new Hub(port);

This will start your new hub, listening on the indicated port. What you can do next is subscribe to the event that is raised when a channel connects to the hub:

hub.ChannelConnected += Hub_ChannelConnected;

The event arguments will contain an IChannel instance, a reference to which can be kept and used in the same way as if it was created directly:

private void Hub_ChannelConnected(object sender, ChannelConnectedEventArgs e)
{
   _channels.Add(e.Channel);
}

Because IChannel implements IDisposable, remember to dispose of any channels you receive from the hub once you no longer need to communicate through them.

To create a channel and send some data to a hub, it is as easy as:

var channel = new Channel(host, port);
client.Send("TEST #1");

Capturing replies from hubs is also quite easy, just subscribe to the event:

channel.StringMessageReceived += Client_StringMessageReceived;

Remember that using a channel you've created yourself is exactly the same as using a channel provided by a hub.

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