Darren White

Keyvan Nayyeri

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 Who this book is for This book will suit professional ASP.NET developers familiar with C#, IIS and JavaScript. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction to the Real-Time Web and ASP.NET SignalR Chapter 2: Overview of SignalR Chapter 3: Developing SignalR Applications using Hubs Chapter 4: Working with Persistent Connections Chapter 5: Debugging and Testing Chapter 6: SignalR Clients Chapter 7: Extending SignalR Chapter 8: Configuration and Security Chapter 9: Building a Stock Market Price Updater Chapter 10: Building a Collaborative Drawing Application

Real-Time Communication in .NET with SignalR 2.1

Pro ASP.NET SignalR

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.

Visual Studio is a development IDE created by Microsoft to enable easier development for Microsoft programming languages as well as development technologies. It has been the most popular IDE for working with Microsoft development products for the past 10 years. Extensibility is a key feature of Visual Studio. There have not been many books written on this aspect of Visual Studio. Visual Studio Extensibility (VSX) can be considered a hard topic to learn for many developers in comparison with most .NET related topics. Also, its APIs are very complex and not very well written. Some may refer to these APIs as “dirty” because they do not have good structure, naming convention, or consistency. Visual Studio is now 10 years old. It was created during the COM days for COM programming but later migrated to .NET. However, Visual Studio still relies heavily on COM programming. It was revamped when moving to the .NET platform but still contains its COM nature; this fact is what makes it harder for .NET developers to work with VSX. Because it is an older product built on two technologies, it has produced inconsistency in code. Although there are problems with the current version of VSX, the future looks bright for it. The many different teams working on the software have been moved into one umbrella group known as the Visual Studio Ecosystem team. Throughout the past 10 years Visual Studio has continued to grow and new extensibility features have been added. Learning all of the options with their different purposes and implementations is not easy. Many extensibility features are broad topics such as add-ins, macros, and the new domain-specific language tools in Visual Studio. Learning these topics can be difficult because they are not closely related to general .NET programming topics. This book is for .NET developers who are interested in extending Visual Studio as their development tool. In order to understand the book you must know the following material well: Object-oriented programming (OOP), the .NET Framework and .NET programming, C# or Visual Basic languages, some familiarity with C++, some familiarity with XML and its related topics, and Visual Studio structure and usage. A familiarity with COM programming and different .NET technologies is helpful. The aims of this book are to: Provide an overview of all aspects of VSX Enable readers to know where/when to use extensibility Familiarize readers with VS Extensibility in detail Show readers the first steps and let them learn through their own experiences Use examples, sample code, and case studies to demonstrate things in such a way that helps readers understand the concepts Avoid bothering readers with long discussions and useless code samples In order to use this book, and get the most out of it, there are some technical requirements. You must have the following two packages installed on your machine to be able to read/understand the chapters and test code samples: Visual Studio 2008 Team System Edition (or other commercial editions) Visual Studio 2008 SDK 1.0 (or its newer versions) You will need to buy Visual Studio 2008 to register for an evaluation version. The Free Express editions of Visual Studio do not support the extensibility options. The Visual Studio SDK is needed in order to read some of the chapters in the book and can be downloaded as a free package. The operating system doesn’t matter for the content of the book, but all code was written with Visual Studio 2008 Team System Edition in Windows Vista x86. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 will give you an introduction to the basic concepts you need to understand before you can move on to the rest of the book. Chapter 4 discusses the automation model, which is an important prerequisite for many

Keyvan Nayyeri

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