Can Anyone Recommend an ASP.NET MVC Group Chat Control?

Question

I need to provide a window on an ASP.NET MVC web page where registered users of the site can group chat live.

Can anyone recommend a component or control that can provide real-time group chat that I can embed on an ASP.NET MVC page?

I am willing to use free or commercial components, as well as a web service.

I looked into a few web 2.0 approaches, like:

• Campfire - problem is, it takes you to a separate site, and I can't embed the chat window (at least that's what they said when I contacted support)
• Meebo - requires that users have Meebo accounts (I think)

What's unique here is that I need to enable site users to chat live with each other - not with a central support person (like LivePerson, or the Meebo widget).

Answer 1

All you really need is an action to post new messages to, an action to poll for updates, and a div to place the items.

You can accomplish all of this pretty easily with ajax and those two actions on a ChatController in ASP.NET MVC.

+1 for Campfire though, it's a really well polished tool.

Answer 2

There's an unofficial developer API for Campfire called Tinder.

I saw that that 37 Signals was promoting it on their website here, so it's probably pretty good.