Check if a Socket is Connected before sending Data

I'm using super-simple synchronous C# Sockets for an assignment. The assignment is to create a peer-to-peer chat program, so each instance must work as both a client and a server. My program works great when I put it into listen mode: (StateBall is an object that passes state variables around)

public void startListening()
{
    lState = new StateBall();
    IPEndPoint peer = new IPEndPoint(StateBall.host, StateBall.port);
    lSocket = new Socket(AddressFamily.InterNetwork, SocketType.Stream,    
    ProtocolType.Tcp);

    try
    {
        lSocket.Bind(peer);
        lSocket.Listen(10);
        Console.WriteLine("Waiting for a connection...");

        StateBall.updateText("Waiting for a Connection...");

        client = lSocket.Accept();
        StateBall.toSend=StateBall.ourName;

        StateBall.updateText("Connection made! Sending our name...");
...

But when I try to start a second instance and connect to an already running instance it just hangs and doesn't connect.

From what I've seen on this site and the rest of the Web I could ch开发者_StackOverflow社区eck for a pre-existing connection using something like:

try{
    lsocket.Connect(peer);
}
catch(Exception ex){
    //check for SocketException type and errors
}

And then go on with my program, but is there a clean way to integrate that initial check into the already existing code? Or is there a better way to check for an active host before attempting to call Connect on my socket object?

You can and probably should handle more than one concurrent connection. Simply call accept in a loop and dispatch the clients on separate threads. I suppose that you only use one thread so when the server is busy with one client connection attempts time out on the client side.