What this book covers

Chapter 1, The Primer, shows us that in order to hit the ground running with SignalR, it is important to understand why we need SignalR, but even more importantly, the architectural decisions that lead to the thinking behind SignalR. For the remainder of this book, there will be patterns and practices applied; this chapter covers that. In addition, it also covers the libraries being used.

Chapter 2, Overheating the Discussion, starts gradually by getting to know the basics, without introducing too much technology and patterns and practices. This chapter goes through the building of a forum that benefits from SignalR.

Chapter 3, Extra! Extra! Read All About It!, introduces e-newspapers—a great scenario for SignalR and a quite common feature found on the Web. Having SignalR at the core could be the tiny thing that differentiates you from the crowd. You'll learn how to scale to meet demand when things go viral.

Chapter 4, Can You Measure It?, introduces increasingly popular dashboards that will give you numbers at a glance. Often, the aim is to have the dashboards as up to date as possible but without having to do a timer that refreshes. SignalR can help here and light it all up, and with the right technique, make it visually appealing.

Chapter 5, What Line of Business Are You In?, shows that enterprise line of business apps are often referred to as where user experiences go to die, leaving users out of the equation when the software is designed and implemented. There are no reasons whatsoever for this. This chapter investigates how can we start to think differently about things and make them twinkle, like the stars discovered by the many voyages of the Starship Enterprise.

Chapter 6, An Architectural Taste, shows that software architecture is very important for many reasons, and this chapter looks more closely at a particular flavor that lends itself to the idea of real-time applications.

Chapter 7, The Three Screens – Mobile First, teaches how to connect the phone as a frontend for what we built in the previous chapter. SignalR is not only for the Web; it supports a wide variety of platforms, one of them being the Windows Phone.

Chapter 8, Putting the X in .NET – Xamarin, builds a frontend for the forum in Chapter 2, Overheating the Discussion, for the iPhone.

Chapter 9, Debugging or Troubleshooting, shows a few techniques that you can apply to find out why the code gets broken or systems in general don't do what they are told to. Then, you need to figure out what went wrong.

Chapter 10, Hosting and Deployment, walks through the varieties and particularly focuses on cloud and Microsoft Azure. An important fact here will be how one scales.