.Net 4.5 Websocket Push Technology?

Question

Among the improvements announced for WCF, I see this: Websockets support to enable true bidirectional communication over ports 80 and 443 with performance characteristics similar to the TCP transport.

That sounds suspiciously like the persistent HTTP 1.1 TCP connection could be used to push data to the client. Is that indeed implied or intended? Or is SignalR still the only MS-offered game for that feature?

Answer 1

.NET 4.5 also includes WebSocket client and server (server on Win 8 only); the server includes asp.net and HttpListener implementations, both allowing push to clients. If you want WebSocket, personally I use that rather than WCF - less abstractions.

Until 4.5, I think you are correct as far as MS-provided implementations are concerned.

There are other implementations: SuperWebSocket should work fine. I hand-rolled the WebSocket implementation we use here - it wasn't overly taxing, although I'd like to replace it with HttpListener when that is available.

Re persistent http 1.1 tcp connections: It should be noted that once the initial handshake is complete, it is not a http connection; it is WebSocket over tcp.