Table of Contents

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Table of Contents

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Preface

Users are becoming more advanced, technology is moving forward at a rapid pace, and we have more options with cloud computing than ever before. All of this calls for thinking differently about how we make our applications work smarter, deliver faster, and not let the user poll for information but rather have data and changes pushed directly to the user without the user having to interact with anything. With demand on functionality and a world with many platforms, we as developers, are constantly seeking out new ways to make it easier to target all of these; the Web has become the result of this search with HTML5 and JavaScript engines becoming much faster and more widely available. We are relying more and more on the aging HTTP protocol to be our vessel for information to the user. SignalR provides the ability to let you as a developer not have to think about all the details of creating applications that meet all these requirements, and not only for web applications. The purpose of this book is to provide you with a step-by-step guide for starting with SignalR, and also to give an insight into why you would want to SignalR enable your application. Throughout the book we will be building an application with a server component and multiple clients—Web,.NET, and Windows8/WinJS.

What this book covers

Chapter 1, Revitalizing the rich client, will teach you that in order to get started with SignalR and real-time web applications, it is important to understand the motivation behind wanting to have such a technology and approach to application development.

Chapter 2, Persistent Connections, will help you understand that at the core of SignalR sits something called PersistentConnection; this is where everything starts. In this chapter you will learn how to get started with it in the backend and consuming it in the frontend.

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Chapter 3, Hubs, will move you up one abstraction layer from PersistentConnection to something called Hubs. A Hub provides a more natural abstraction for most scenarios. A Hub is easier to write and easier to consume.

Chapter 4, Groups, will explain grouping. Sometimes you want to filter messages so that you can better control which clients get what messages. Grouping is a way in SignalR to accomplish this; you will learn how to deal with this on the server and the client.

Chapter 5, State, will explain you that in addition to sending messages between client and server that are very explicit, you sometimes need to have accompanying metadata or additional data that is cross-cutting. In this chapter, you will learn how state can go back and forth with messages.

Chapter 6, Security, is about how every application needs to take security into consideration. In this chapter, you will learn techniques that you can apply to your SignalR code to secure messages.

Chapter 7, Scaling Out, will show you how to scale out and be able to deal with building applications that scale on multiple servers, not only in an on-premise environment but also in Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud.

Chapter 8, Monitoring, will show you how to monitor messages and look at possible performance bottlenecks. Debugging is part of the everyday life of a developer and, of course, it applies to development with SignalR.

Chapter 9, Hosting a Server Using OWIN, will look at how to self host a simple console application using OWIN. Open Web Interfaces for .NET is an abstraction-enabling web framework to be agnostic about the underlying platform.

Chapter 10, WinJS and Windows8, will port our web client to be a Windows 8 store application through the usage of WinJS.

What you need for this book

In order to get started with SignalR you will need either Visual Studio 2010, any edition, although NuGet, which you also need, is not supported out of the box for the express edition. You can also use Visual Studio 2012; in fact, the book has been written using it. With Visual Studio 2012, the express edition has NuGet out of the box. For NuGet you can go to http://www.nuget.org for more information. As a side note, it is also possible to use Mono for development and Xamarin Studio, if you are on a different platform such as Linux or Mac. The code is the same—you just need to manage the references differently. SignalR has Mono packages on NuGet.

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Who this book is for

This book is primarily for .NET developers. It also targets those .NET developers who are working on web solutions with HTML and JavaScript.

Conventions

In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.

Code words in text are shown as follows: "We can include other contexts through the use of the include directive."

A block of code is set as follows:

Var connection = new Connection (http://localhost:1599/chat);

Any command-line input or output is written as follows:

$("#sendButton").click(function() { chat.server.send($("#messageTextBox").val()); $("#messageTextBox").val("");

New terms and important words are shown in bold. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in the text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".

Warnings or important notes appear in a box like this.

Tips and tricks appear like this.

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