I’m looking to connect my WinJS app to mobile browser clients via a cloud service that everyone connects to using web sockets.
I built a solution using socket.io that works well as long as my node.js server is hosted on localhost 🙂 When I deploy my server to Azure, the Windows 8 app returns an error saying it can’t load external content in a local context (after calling socket.io’s connect()).
Looking at the web sockets sample on MSDN, I think that I should use the built-in functionality in Windows.Networking.Sockets for at least what’s between my app and the public cloud service as it won’t try to load external resources.
My question is: what are the options for the other end of the tunnel? Does it require a .NET 4.5 host with IIS 8 (since IIS 7 doesn’t support WS)? I don’t think those exist today yet, so I’m wondering what the development story is here.
Depending on what I end up using for the server, I think I’ll have to use socket.io again or SignalR to serve the clients (most won’t support web sockets and I need a good cross-browser library :))
(Answering my own question)
I was behind a proxy that didn’t allow the web socket connection from socket.io in my Win8 app through, and so it fell back on a method that required loading external resources.
Bypassing that problematic proxy, the connection works fine and I can use socket.io from my app as intended. I’m hosting the other end on Azure (per the node.js + socket.io tutorial they provide) and it works. I still don’t know what a developer wanting to use the built-in web sockets library should use for a host, but I imagine we have to wait for IIS 8 to be out.
Now I’m left to verify that the app can pass certification with this library.