[darthian]

I have plans to start working on a text/video/and voice chat as a hobby project. I have become addicted to working with the .NET platform and just want to mess around with a VoIP project. The project will be using WPF to create a custom interface, however I'm not sure if I should use WCF. It seems like WCF wouldn't be suitable to handle voice. Should I stick with sockets?

[eclipsed4utoo]

WCF is great for a lot of things, but for voice, I would still go with Sockets.

[lordofduct]

Part of me wants to say Sockets...

But I'm loving WCF since I started using it about a year and a half ago. I personally haven't done any streaming of audio or video over it, but MS has it built directly into it, and it's relatively simple to set up (especially if you're already used to setting up a WCF service...). It does put some restriction on the Binding contracts you can use.

Those are:
BasicHttpBinding
NetTcpBinding
NetNamePipeBinding
WebHttpBinding

Here, read this:

http://msdn.microsof...y/ms733742.aspx




Since it's a "hobby" project, I'd ask what you plan on getting out of the project? If you're using it to learn Sockets, go for it! But if it were me, I'd do it with WCF just for the fun of it, see how it does.

Of course you can wrap said WCF binding with some version of the Facade Pattern and than implement both a WCF communication method and a Socket based communication method. And then you could compare the two in your system...