Using WebSocket in .NET 4.5 (Part 4)

Introduction

Part 1 gives an overview of the WebSocket protocol and .NET WebSocket support. Part 2 demonstrates how to use WebSocket in traditional ASP.NET and MVC 4 web applications. Part 3 demonstrates how to use WCF to host and communicate with WebSocket service, and also gives a solution to use JavaScript WebSocket API to call WebSocket WCF service.

Other than the solutions above, Microsoft has released a utility assembly which helps to use .NET server-side WebSocket APIs like using the event-based JavaScript WebSocket APIs. I will briefly introduce how to use it in this article.   

MSWSChat.zip is the sample to host in ASP.NET. 

MSWcfWSChat.zip is the sample to host as a WCF Service. 

Background    

Microsoft.WebSockets.dll  was initially released to wrap .NET WebSocket APIs and to help people easily use them. The wrapper makes the communication to event-based. It supports both binary (byte[]) and text messages. Note that the namespace is Microsoft.Web.WebSockets. It is a bit different from the assembly name.  

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