Chat applications are, in one form or another, probably as old as the internet itself. This isn't hard to believe since the original purpose of the internet was to allow communication between researchers. During those early days, this communication would have been much faster than sending a letter, but still far from instant.
In this chapter, we will create an application that allows visitors to a website to chat with each other in real time. Specifically, we will cover the following topics:
- Configuring an Azure SignalR Service
- Designing and setting up the project
- Adding the SignalR libraries
- Building the server
- Creating a client
- Running the application