TcpClient disconnects after awhile from Twitch IRC

Question

My issue is that after I connect to the IRC and I am receiving raw text from the IRC and logging it but then it just decides to disconnect from the server after inactivity or 2-3 seconds after I start it (unconfirmed).

Any help would be appreciated. Here's my code (had issues posting it here): http://pastebin.com/Ls5rv0RP

I need it to stop disconnecting but I cant really find a way to. I know the popular mIRC client disconnects from Twitch after x amount of time but reconnects and that's fine to as long as it KNOWS to reconnect in a timely manner (2-5 seconds).

The part were it replys to PING/PONG's:

if (buf.StartsWith("PING ")) output.Write(buf.Replace("PING", "PONG") + "\r\n"); output.Flush();

Any help is appreciated.

Answer 1

This code below helps keep my Twitch bot from disconnecting by running a separate thread that pings to the IRC server.

PingSender Class:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Linq;
using System.Text;
using System.Threading;

namespace TwitchBot
{
    /*
    * Class that sends PING to irc server every 5 minutes
    */
    class PingSender
    {
        static string PING = "PING ";
        private Thread pingSender;

        // Empty constructor makes instance of Thread
        public PingSender() 
        {
            pingSender = new Thread (new ThreadStart (this.Run) ); 
        } 
        // Starts the thread
        public void Start() 
        { 
            pingSender.Start(); 
        } 
        // Send PING to irc server every 5 minutes
        public void Run()
        {
            while (true)
            {
                Program.irc.sendIrcMessage(PING + "irc.twitch.tv");
                Thread.Sleep(300000); // 5 minutes
            }
        }
    }
}

---

Usage:

/* Ping to twitch server to prevent auto-disconnect */
PingSender ping = new PingSender();
ping.Start();