Pro ASP.NET SignalR: Real-Time Communication in .NET with SignalR 2.1

ASP.NET SignalR is the new solution to real-time communication between servers and clients in .NET. Use it to push new data to a web page or mobile device as soon as it becomes available, whether it’s a notification, live chat, up-to-the-minute financial data, or a range of other exciting applications. Innovations like Google live search and live Facebook and Twitter updates are pushing users’ expectations of the real-time web. With Pro ASP.NET SignalR, you can join this revolution and learn skills that will be valuable for years to come.

Pro ASP.NET SignalR starts with an introduction to the real-time web. Learn about the technologies underlying the SignalR library, such as WebSockets and long-polling, and how SignalR elegantly flips between them depending on the capabilities of the client. Next, meet the concepts of hubs and persistent connections and how to use them to build the components of an ASP.NET SignalR application. Find out how to extend, test, debug, configure, scale, and host your applications, and how to target a range of clients, including Windows and iOS.

The book rounds off with two case studies—a stock market price updater, and a collaborative drawing application—so you can get to grips with SignalR in a realistic scenario, using a broad range of the concepts covered in earlier chapters.

As real-time updates to web and mobile apps become the norm, Pro ASP.NET SignalR will be your in-depth, one-stop companion to this new and exciting technology.

What you’ll learn

• The concept of hubs and hub proxies, and how to use them to build SignalR applications quickly and easily
• The concept of persistent connections and how to use them to build more advanced SignalR applications
• Debugging SignalR applications
• Configuring and scaling SignalR applications
• Hosting SignalR applications on Windows Azure
• How to apply all these concepts to a real ASP.NET or Windows Store app

About the Authors

Keyvan Nayyeri is a software engineer with a master of science degree in computer science and a bachelor of science degree in applied mathematics. He has been an active contributor to the .NET community for more than ten years, published various articles about .NET programming, and contributed to several open-source projects.

Keyvan has authored several titles, including Professional Community Server, Professional Visual Studio Extensibility, and Beginning ASP.NET MVC 1.0. He was also a guest author and technical editor on Professional Visual Studio 2008.

Darren White is a lead software engineer in Dallas, Texas, and has a bachelor of science in computer science from the University of Oklahoma. He is an officer in the North Dallas .NET User Group and is a local user group speaker.

Darren has been working with Microsoft technologies since Visual Basic 3. His primary technical focus is on server-side technologies using C#. In his rare moments of free time, he can be found studying new technologies, mathematics, or French.