Question

I am attempting to get websockets working in my dev environment:

• Visual Studio 2010
• Windows 7
• Signal R 0.51
• Latest Chrome / Firefox

Unfortunately the Javscript client is using long polling. When I force web-sockets on the client side I can’t connect at all:

$.connection.hub.start({ transport: ['webSockets'] })

Server code is self-hosted and based on the sample and looks like:

static void Main(string[] args)
{
    string url = "http://localhost:8081/";
    var server = new Server(url);

    // Map the default hub url (/signalr)
    server.MapHubs();

    // Start the server
    server.Start();

    Console.WriteLine("Server running on {0}", url);

    // Keep going until somebody hits 'x'
    while (true)
    {
        ConsoleKeyInfo ki = Console.ReadKey(true);
        if (ki.Key == ConsoleKey.X)
        {
            break;
        }
    }
}

public class MyHub : Hub
{            
    public void Send(string message)
    {
        Clients.addMessage(message);
    }
}

I’ve searched around and found nothing definitive. Do I need to specify some extra things, use Visual Studio 2012 or will this only work on Windows 8 / IIS 8?

Answer 1

Based on this answer https://stackoverflow.com/a/9135334/700926 you will see that WebSocket support in SignalR relies on Windows 8 / IIS8 – the answer also points to a wiki page at SignalR’s github page, however, that page does not exists anymore.

But, by cloning the wiki repo at github and go back some revisions you will see the documentation of the SignalR.WebSockets project which according to SignalR’s github page, does not exist anymore – (which might explain why the wiki site is removed) – however, in a revision of the wikipage for SignalR.WebSockets from February this year, it stated that:

The SignalR.WebSockets
package can be added to an existing SignalR project to allow clients
to connect using the WebSocket
protocol. The SignalR
jQuery client will automatically attempt to connect via WebSockets (if
the browser supports it) so no changes are necessary on the client
side to add WebSockets to your SignalR based application.

SignalR.WebSockets relies on
Microsoft.WebSockets
in order to listen for incoming WebSocket connections from within
ASP.NET. This package in turn depends on the new WebSockets support
that was added to ASP.NET 4.5 and IIS 8.0. As a result, the
SignalR.WebSockets package will only work on a Windows 8 machine (.NET
4.5 will install on earlier versions of Windows but Windows 8 is required for IIS 8.0). For more information on how to setup a Windows
8 machine (using the developer preview) see
here.

I have tried searching for newer information than what I have been able to provide above, but as far as I can tell, the SignalR wiki does not cover this topic explicitly in its current version.