The projects I’ll present are loosely based on his code. Back in 2011, he blogged about them, accompanied by code that included decent comments in a unique side-by-side presentation. Probably the best websocket example I found online was from Microsoft’s own Paul Batum. I can write all kinds of code that compiles and runs, but Doing Useful Stuff is the name of the game, and apparently striking that balance when writing sample code is more difficult than it seems.īefore we dig in, I’ll mention that all of the code for this article can be found in my WebSocketExample repository on GitHub. Very infrequently, the opposite problem applies – I want an example, not the source for a full-blown production-quality application. There is plenty of code out there that works, but the examples never seem to do anything in a realistic fashion. In spite of both being around for quite awhile, I was surprised by the lack of “functional” examples. If websockets are kind of old news by this point, named pipes are positively ancient. The only other thing I’ll say about named pipes is that if you have a burning desire to mess around with them, my NamedPipesExample GitHub repo is probably a good place to start. Suffice to say I wasn’t satisfied with the result, which is why this article is about websockets instead of named pipes. Unfortunately, I had forgotten just how clumsy they are. NET 3.5, but it seemed like a reasonable place to start since I already had some experience under my belt. I hadn’t touched them since they were introduced about ten years ago in.

The next best thing was to send my output to another process, a console-by-proxy.īack in the 90s I had done interprocess communication using Windows’ named pipes feature. But old habits die hard, and I wanted live, console-style output. For heavyweight requirements, you could go to extremes and use a plug-in logger like Serilog. If the data is minimal, stash it into a List and dump it to a file. There are lots of other ways to accomplish similar results, of course. I was very surprised to discover Windows doesn’t support this – not even if you’re willing to p/invoke calls to the Win32 API. I recently ran into a scenario where it would be very handy to have multiple consoles. But regardless of what crusty old C programmers might think, these days I make heavy use of this approach. After all, when your only output is the character mode screen (I’m talking the really old days, the 70s and 80s), trashing everything with debug output was kind of sloppy. In the old days, dumping debug information to the console was disparagingly referred to as “printf debugging”. Update: The GitHub code for this article has been updated as a result of my newer August 2019 articles, How to Close a WebSocket (Correctly) and A Minimal Full-Feature Kestrel WebSocket Server. Learn from this simple websocket server with realistic features.

C websocket server