By Andrew Westgarth.

With the increasing desire to provide the most fluid and responsive web applications we possibly can, one of the challenges which developers face is how to build real-time data rich web applications.  A project I have been taking a look at over the last few months is SignalR.  SignalR is an asynchronous library for .NET which enables developers to take advantage of web sockets when available but which automatically switches back to long polling when not available.  As web socket support is mixed amongst browser versions and server versions, support in IIS will be coming with IIS 8,  SignalR really fills a gap and reduces the work that is required to get up and running.

The development of SignalR continues at a pace and recently David Fowler has announced that in SignalR 0.5 there will be Webfarm Support and Mono Support amongst other new features detailed in his blog post http://weblogs.asp.net/davidfowler/archive/2012/05/02/signalr-0-5.aspx in addition to outlining some of the features they are looking to add in upcoming releases.

Author Bio

Andrew Westgarth

http://www.andrewwestgarth.co.uk

Andrew is an MVP (Internet Information Services) and Co-founder of North East Bytes, a free technical User Group covering the North East and Cumbrian regions of the UK , covering Development and IT Pro topics every month. He also organises DDD North. Andrew is a Technical Architect at Sage (UK) Ltd working on large scale web applications.  Andrew is very active in the UK Developer Community, attending and speaking at multiple events, supporting users and other User Groups. In the past he has spoken at the Irish Microsoft Technology Conference, VBUG's National Two Day Conference; DDD Events and local User Group meetings. Andrew has experience in VB6/.NET; C#; ASP.NET and Internet Information Services. His current technical interests include IIS 8.0/7.5/7.0, IIS Extensions and Windows Azure; Personal Performance Improvement and Best Practices.