Summary

The networking classes in the .NET Framework are broadly comparable to their Java equivalents. The TcpListener, TcpClient, and UdpClient classes are all easy to use but don’t expose asynchronous features. The Socket class allows complete control over the connection but is difficult to use and requires a deeper knowledge of socket programming, often exposing the WinSock32 API in a confusing manner.

Overall, the networking classes are well designed, and we feel that they are better thought out than the Java equivalents, but there is a gap where the partially abstracted functionality of the Java Socket class would be useful.

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