CODEWITHSUNDEEP
xamarin.ioswindows-runtimexamarin.androidwindows-phonemvvmcross
tourili
tourili

Reputation: 141

Best way to include Socket MvvmCross with PCL

First I would like to thank you (Stuart in special) for this amazing framework MvvmCross.

I have an application case that involves socket connectivity, and I would like to go with PCL for Android, WP7 and iOs.

Unfortunately, the PCL subset doesn't support sockets usage as is (I think NCL is supported only for Microsoft different frameworks).

I thought may be MvvmCross Plugin is the way to go, but still needs plugin implementation for each platform (I mean ...plugin.Droid, ..plugin.WP7 etc..) while it should be the same code at the end.

What do yo suggest?

Thanks

Upvotes: 2

Views: 405

Answers (1)

Stuart
Stuart

Reputation: 66882

I thought may be MvvmCross Plugin is the way to go

Yes, this is exactly the sort of situation that Plugins were designed for.

I'd certainly implement this as a socket plugin:

  • The PCL part of the plugin would provided a socket interface, although it might also perhaps include some shared base class 'buffer copy' type functionality in the shared code too.

  • The platform specific socket implementations which handle raw socket connection and IO.

    It's likely that these platform plugin additions would use quite a lot of file linking between several of the platform implementations - I'd expect there to be a lot of code that would have to be shared this way.

I think a sockets plugin will be quite a common requirement - so if you were to tackle this via open source, then you might find some willing contributors ... or, if you were to go closed source, then you might find some customers.

While no-one has open-sourced an IP network socket implementation at this stage, the Sphero project did include a Bluetooth socket example - albeit one that wasn't entirely network efficient in the way it communicated.

This Bluetooth socket code is open sourced within Ms-PL at https://github.com/slodge/BallControl/tree/master/Cirrious.Sphero.WorkBench/Plugins/Sphero

This Sphero plugin doesn't expose a PCL Sphero-Socket level API - instead at the plugin level it chooses to expose a Sphero-Robot level API.

With the benefit of hindsight (a wonderful thing), if I implemented this again then I'd implement:

  • a bluetooth serial port plugin exposing bluetooth scanning, connecting and socket streaming
  • an additional PCL library which consumed the plugin to drive the robot - this perhaps might be called a plugin but would not have any non-PCL code within it.

Upvotes: 2

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