.Networking
Note: .Networking is Deprecated
Networking is included for historical purposes. We have migrated to our next generation .NetworkingGT (see sidebar for a link) and recommend you do so as well.
.Networking is a toolkit for rapidly prototyping groupware applications with the Microsoft.NET platform. It provides the shared dictionary: a centrally coordinated distributed shared memory system for inter-application communication. Programmers work with the shared dictionary as though it were a hash table. Values are identified with string keys that look like paths in a conventional disk file system. Behind the API the programmer works with, the networking infrastructure takes care of serializable values and distributing them through the client/server architecture. Programmers can monitor the dictionary for changes with subscriptions.
Contents
Download and Installation
The download instructions and files can be found on the GroupLab .Networking website:
http://grouplab.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/software/networking/
Recipes and How-To's
- How to use wildcards in the path
- How to use the connect dialog
- How to register event handlers
- How to setting up a subscription
- How to add values to the Shared Dictionary
- How to retrieve values from the Shared Dictionary
- How to iterate through the dictionary
- How to make entries dependent on the client's lifetime (transient, lifetime)
- How to use Maps
- How to use secure dictionary and password protection
- How to use the new persistent dictionary features
Shared Dictionary Explainer
Tutorials and Examples
- Incrementor: multiple clients increment a shared value in the Shared Dictionary
- Simple Text Chat: two clients share text using the Shared Dictionary
- Dictionary Users: a client displays a list of users connected to the Shared Dictionary
- Vector: multiple clients add, remove or modify elements of a Vector using Shared Dictionary
- Simple File Transfer Part 1: multiple clients upload and download files using Shared Dictionary
- Simple File Transfer Part 2: multiple clients pause and resume files while transferring
- Mike Boyle's step-by-step video tutorials:
Links
- XML Documentation
- Mike Boyle's thoughts on new Shared Dictionary Features: Things we may change in the future.