Real-time communication can make any application that much more interactive. Whether it be a simple chat application, or other notifications that are pushed live to the client, there is a significant improvement in the user experience when this information is pushed in real-time to the client without the need for a page refresh, or specifically having to pull this data. In many user facing applications, this is usually accomplished using WebSocket protocol. And in the .Net space, the dominant library for WebSocket support is
SignalR. SignalR provides a number of advantages over directly using WebSockets, because it provides several features on top. Some of these features include improved connection management (e.g. how to handle reconnecting), sending messages to all or only some clients, and built-in scaling. Additionally, SignalR can automatically fallback to Server-sent events or Long-Polling depending on what the client supports.