How to send/receive messages through a web socket on windows phone 8 using the class ClientWebSocket?

Question

The web socket is written in javascript by my colleague. I managed to connect. First of all I have to log in on the application using a test account. I have to send the email and password through a json. I have installed the Json.Net packet using NuGet.

Some code that I found on my reaserch is this, but I do not understand how to send my data using that segment.

var buffer = new byte[1024];
var segment = new ArraySegment<byte>(buffer);
webSocket.SendAsync(segment, WebSocketMessageType.Text, true, CancellationToken.None);

Of course, I can use an object

User user=new User();
user.Email="bla@bla.com";
user.Password="pass";
string json = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(user);

But it will not be of any use because the method SendAsync accepts only byte type on segment.

All I want is to send that data, and if log in succeeds, I should receive other data (in Json format) about the user.

As a side note, I am quite new to web sockets, I used http protocols from ASP.NET WEB API 2.

Answer 1

I have no idea about Windows Phone 8, but by the code you pasted it seems similar to the regular .NET ClientWebSocket, so here you have some examples:

public static Task SendString(ClientWebSocket ws, String data, CancellationToken cancellation)
{
    var encoded = Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(data);
    var buffer = new ArraySegment<Byte>(encoded, 0, encoded.Length);
    return ws.SendAsync(buffer, WebSocketMessageType.Text, true, cancellation);
}

public static async Task<String> ReadString(ClientWebSocket ws)
{
    ArraySegment<Byte> buffer = new ArraySegment<byte>(new Byte[8192]);

    WebSocketReceiveResult result = null;

    using (var ms = new MemoryStream())
    {
        do
        {
            result = await ws.ReceiveAsync(buffer, CancellationToken.None);
            ms.Write(buffer.Array, buffer.Offset, result.Count);
        }
        while (!result.EndOfMessage);

        ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);

        using (var reader = new StreamReader(ms, Encoding.UTF8))
            return reader.ReadToEnd();
    }
}

If something does not compile or exists in WP8, just find an equivalent.