C# Select (non-blocking) tutorial?

Asynchronous sockets are what you get when you call WSAAsyncSelect(), and it posts messages to your main message loop. Performance is awful.

That article is confusing, because it's talking about "asynchronous I/O" within the context of the .NET framework -- which is really implemented using I/O completion ports and overlapped I/O.

Remember: "Asynchronous I/O" != "Asynchronous Sockets".

Using the .NET sockets in asynchronous mode (based on I/O completion) is fine for performance and games.

C#/.NET select will behave just like the general BSD style select() except that it replaces FDSETs with standard .NET enumerables, and ignores the traditional first parameter. Thus any common tutorial for select() (such as Beej's) will be fine to learn from; remembering the slight changes. I have some code floating around somewhere that uses it if you still run accross problems.

I don't see what's confusing about that article, but anyways: Asynchronous I/O is implemented using I/O completion ports (when available), but that is certainly not guaranteed (and ealier versions of the framework didn't use IOCP in certain classes).

As far as Socket.Select goes, it uses the traditional select() function to perform its work.

Performance wise, asynchronous functions (Begin/End) will beat out select hands down if you need a great many sockets. Two things though: first of all, you will have two design around that functionality. The traditional approaches just don't work with Async I/O. Secondly, the performance gains for a small number of sockets is negligable at best, and the design requirements may cause you some headaches unless you have experience with threading/IOCP.

The confusion is that nPawn confused "asynchronous I/O" with "asynchronous sockets" which are not the same thing.

In fact, what most people call "asynchronous I/O" is, technically, called overlapped I/O on Windows kernels, so the article is confusing by not using the underlying terminology.

Again: "asynchronous sockets" != "asynchronous I/O".

Also, "asynchronous sockets" != "asynchronous (overlapped) I/O on sockets".

Thanks for the clarification!