The project was created with .NET core 3.5.1 and vsCode. It doesn't have any real world use case since all of the participants are on the same machine!
I just tried to implement Object Oriented and SOLID best practices including dependency injection with C#.
As we know in general usually there should be a web socket server which acts as a central unit for signaling/broadcasting and also as a single source of truth for keeping the state of the session and connections. And this server doesn’t act as a client and clients will connect to it for sending data and receiving notifications/data. But in our case the story is bit different so I’ve decided to make the first client, also the server and state keeper.
So it works like this:
Every time that a client wants to join a chat they simply open a websocket to the given port and if there is no server, then runs the server and starts to act as a broadcaster and state manager, without the user even recognising it.
Note about checking if the server is up or not: Since everything runs locally we don’t need to check a couple of edge cases that we do in ethernet/internet connections (like checking if local network is working or not, or maybe we don’t have internet!). So I ended up simply by seeing if a server is up and running on that port or not.
Since our presentation layer is very simple, I’ve prevented using MVP or MVVM and came up with MCV to focus more on logic and introduced a service layer to separate the logic even in more details.
The flow is pretty standard, directly from upper layer to down and via notification from down to up. I just tried to use another approach in the infrastructure layer to show another way by using an observer pattern.
Everything is decoupled by using interfaces and orchestrated by a central IOC container.
- Inside the VSCode simply hit CTRL + SHIFT + B to run the build command. It will create a dll file here: ./bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.1
- By running this command you can run an instance of application:
dotnet ./bin/Debug/netcoreapp3.1/c-sharp-local-chat-solid.dll
Just run this command:
dotnet run