SignalR Scaleout with SQL Server in Azure

A project for one of our customers recently had this scenario where mobile clients posted updates to a REST-backend running on one site and we needed to notify all clients browsing a different site. The first technique that came into mind was SignalR but we had only used it within the same app before. Now we’d like to share a hub across apps.

Fortunately, the solution was very simple, SignalR supports CORS and scaling out with SQL server out of the box. All you need to install is the following two nuget packages.

PM> Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR
PM> Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.SqlServer

This is truly powerful and the SignalR-team has done a great job making it easy to use. There’s an excellent official guide here. Here’s a screencast to show how quickly and easy you can get it up and running in Azure from scratch.

Source code @ https://github.com/ajtowf/signalrlab/

Hope you find it useful!

Keywords : VS2013, Azure, SignalR, WebApi, MVC, OWIN, SQL Server