At lunch today I created a little fun website and it only took about 15 minutes (as you can plainly see from the styling).

Technologies

The technologies involved were

• Azure (website)

• SignalR

• ASP MVC 4

• .NET 4 (because at the time of writing Azure doesn’t support .NET 4.5 not that I need it).

Let me explain how I did it, the reason I did it was simple, I was sick to death of seeing all these posts on SignalR without actually having used it. ASP MVC is my choice of web tech these days so that was a foregone conclusion, and Azure has provided 10 free Azure websites for these sort of sites. Here we see the main page with an educational video

Here we see a test with two local browsers

Step 1. Create an ASP MVC4 Web internet web application, add a Chat controller. Add a view for the Index method.

Step 2. Import the SignalR package

Step 3. Add the following class to your project.

Step 4. Add the following JavaScript to your project.

Step 5. Check it out for yourself, www.manfluanonymous.com.

I left it running earlier and these are the messages that people entered over the last few hours.

Disclaimer: I copied the SignalR code from someone on the net, if I could remember who I’d give credit.