Closing network streams

[liRetro]

Hi,

I have been writing a simple tcp client and server. I want to verify when to close the network stream. I have a the server thread pushing out data to the listener, but it does so as new data gets generated. Do I close the network stream when I'm done sending a particular unit of data? Or do I only close the stream when I'm totally done with the client and want to disconnect?

m_tcOutput is already a connected tcpClient.

System.Net.Sockets.NetworkStream	nsOut = null;

	nsOut = m_tcOutput.GetStream();
	nsOut.Write(data, 0, data.Length);
	nsOut.Flush();
	nsOut.Close();

is the above ok? Or should I remove the nsOut.Close() call? Remember that I am not done yet, and I will signal the thread to send the client some more data later.

[liRetro]

Through trial and error I found that you should leave the stream open and just forget about it. The tcpClient object will do almost all the cleanups necessary, and calling GetStream() a billion times will only return a billion references to the stream object. It is kind of funny though that you still have to get the stream and close it separate of the tcpClient.close() call. I wish that the tcpClient object had a property that indicated the connection state though, or that I could append an onClose event.

While I appreciate the ability of the NetworkStream objects I guess I'm not too partial to the AsyncCallback system using BeginRead.

[liRetro]

The Close method closes the TCP connection. It calls the Dispose method passing a true value to release all managed and unmanaged resources associated with the TcpClient. These resources include the underlying Socket used for connecting with the remote host, and the NetworkStream used to send and receive data.

But in their example they say

tcpClient.Close ();

// Closing the tcpClient instance does not close the network stream.
netStream.Close ();

LIARS!

[etoostr]

And for your information, this is what the documentation says about NetworkStream.Flush()

Flushes data from the stream. This method is reserved for future use.