How to communicate over local network between C# desktop application and mobile (android) device? [closed]

Answer 1

You can self-host a WCF service service on the desktop (that is, host it within your application rather than through IIS). It's relatively easy to do.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms731758.aspx

Just set up your WCF service to return XML, JSON, whatever you want; and then hit it from the 'droid device.

Answer 2

You can build an android app that uses web technologies: HTML, CSS, Javascript - essentially it'd be like showing a web page but you envelope it with an app. Then you can run with the idea of serving data to it on the network from your PC, but don't need to really use the Android SDK and Java.

There's a good O'Reilly book on the subject: Building Android Apps with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Looks like it's even freely accessible online.

Answer 3

I use a C# HttpListener as follows...

private void CreateListener
{
    HttpListener listener = null;
    HttpListenerContext context = null;
    HttpListenerRequest request = null;
    HttpListenerResponse response = null;
    string PortNumber = "9876";
    string requestUrl;
    Boolean listen = false;

    try
    {
        if (listener == null)
        {
            listener = new HttpListener();
            listener.Prefixes.Add("http://*:" + PortNumber + "/");
            listener.Start();
            listen = true;
            while (listen)
            {
                try
                {
                    context = listener.GetContext();
                }
                catch (Exception e)
                {
                    listen = false;
                }
                if (listen)
                {
                    request = context.Request;
                    requestUrl = request.Url.ToString();

                    // Process request and/or request Url
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

Basically listener.GetContext(); blocks until an HTTP request is received. You can then use request = context.Request to retrive the HTTP request data and process it. You can then use context.Response to return a response.

Fairly simple to implement and adapt.