Hosting any web solution in your own process can be very useful in many scenarios. For instance, let's say you have a legacy Windows app and you are in the process of building a web version of it, but you want to explore new features in the old app before releasing the new one. Hosting these parts on your own using OWIN can then be useful. With the information in this chapter, you should be well on your way to do just that and have SignalR be your transport for communication.

Although SignalR is very technical in its nature, and there are a lot of interesting things it does technically. In my opinion, it is, first and foremost, a tool to increase the user experience. Users today are expecting more from our systems; they've grown accustomed to a certain experience they find in solutions such as Facebook and Twitter, wherein things are delivered almost instantly to them. Through the advances in the mobile space, our users have raised the bar in terms of expectations in general. This...