HttpTunneling a TCPClient application

We have a custom chat application(c#) which uses TCPClient. We are having problem on clients who are behind Firewall or proxy. We know t开发者_Go百科hat these client can browse the internet without a problem so we decided to change our TCPClient application so that It uses HTTP messages to communicate.

Will it be enough just to wrap our text massages with standard HTML tags and HTTP headers? We need a long lasting connection. Does keep-alive have a limit? Do firewalls or proxies have time limits for "alive" connections.

---

You would need to change your protocol, probably pretty significantly. There's no guarantee that a proxy is going to use the same TCP connection for subsequent HTTP requests, it has the freedom to close any connection after receiving a message from the server, and they generally will after only a few idle seconds.

Unless your protocol can work stateless, then it isn't going to work over HTTP through a proxy.