Difference between TCP Listener and Socket

Question

As far as I know I can create a server using both TCPListener and Socket, so what is the difference between the two of them?

Socket

Answer 1

TcpListener is a convenient wrapper for TCP communications. This allows you to use TcpClient for accepted connections--although you can accept sockets instead of clients to use Socket instead of TcpClient. You can do the same thing with Socket; but you have to deal with some of the TCP-specifics (like SocketType.Stream, ProtocolType.Tcp). TCP is a stream-based protocol and TcpClient recognizes that by letting you do stream communications by providing a stream with TcpClient.GetStream(). Socket is at a higher different level and needs to support many different protocols like UDP that aren't stream based.

TcpClient.GetStream returns a NetworkStream object that is suitable for SslStream; so, it should be much less work than using Socket directly. The documentation for SslStream details using TcpListener and TcpClient for SSL communications.