You might have heard of SignalR, a real-time communications library for the web from Microsoft. It’s open source, it’s hip (it supports WebSockets!) – and just about all the Getting Started tutorials are about Chat applications. How many times have you had to write a Chat application in your career? I’d bet a two-toed sloth could keep count for you on one foot and still have digits to spare.
I want to show you how SignalR can solve elegantly a problem you will almost certainly have faced at some point: reporting progress of long-running operations on web pages. I say you’ve probably faced the problem – and if you’re anything like me, you’ve probably ducked out of solving it too, leaving your web site visitors in the tender care of a wait cursor while your web application does its thing in its own sweet time. Getting a server to report back to a web page has always been a fiddle, and many of the techniques in common use feel like hacks. SignalR changes all of that.
Read my three-part guest series on the Safari Books Online blog:
