How to (repeatedly) read from .NET SslStream with a timeout?

Question

I just need to read up to N bytes from a SslStream but if no byte has been received before a timeout, cancel, while leaving the stream in a valid state

Answer 1

You can certainly make approach #1 work. You simply need to keep track of the Task and continue waiting without calling ReadAsync again. So, very roughly:

private Task readTask;     // class level variable
...
  if (readTask == null) readTask = stream->ReadAsync(buffer, 0, buffer->Length);
  if (task->Wait(timeout_ms)) {
     try {
         count = task->Result;
         ...
     }
     finally {
         task = null;
     }
  }

Needs to be fleshed-out a bit so the caller can see that the read isn't completed yet but the snippet is too small to give concrete advice.