few questions about writing a chat client / server

[fguihen]

i want to write a chat client and server , just to keep my programming skills somewhere near ok, since i dont do any c# at work

at present.i have a few questions:

 

what is the best method: Remoting or web services or something i havnt thought of?

 

how do i test on just one machine, i can run the server, but the clients ,if i run two of them on my machine will both have

the same ip address?

[PlausiblyDamp]

Remoting is possibly far too much effort for something as simple as a chat client. Web services are easier but will require a central server hosting the webservice and doesn't really provide any means for the server to notify clients of updates - the clients would be required to poll the server (which is generally a bad thing).

 

The best method (at least for the actual communication) is probably going be using sockets directly (System.Net.Sockets) as this will give more control and better performance.

 

In terms of testing on a single PC each will have the same IP address but would be required to listen on a different port number.