I am implementing some networking stuff in our project. It has been decided that the communication is very important and we want to do it synchronously. So the client sends something the server acknowledges.

Are there some general best practices for the interaction between the client and the server. For instance if there isn't an answer from the server should the client automatically retry? Should there be a timeout period before it retries? What happens if the acknowledgement fails? At what point do we break the connection and reconnect? Is there some material? I have done searches but nothing is really coming up.

I am looking for best practices in general. I am implementing this in c# (probably with sockets) so if there is anything .Net specific then please let me know too.