SignalR lets us control several aspects of the connection lifetime on both the server and the client side. SignalR has the goal of delivering a simple experience based on the idea of a persistent connection, but we cannot really rely on the assumption that it will always be available, because too many factors may interfere with it. While it's true that SignalR does its best to isolate us from these kind of problems, thanks to smart connection strategies and recovery procedures, on the other hand we might need to have finer control over what's happening behind the scenes, and we might want to handle the anomalies and the reconnection procedures ourselves.

In this first recipe of the chapter, we'll use a Hub to illustrate how we can monitor when the connection state changes over time. Later, we will also write a simple JavaScript client in order to show how we can perform the same kind of checks on the client side.