Introduction

In the previous chapter, we covered the basics of using in-browser clients to connect to a SignalR Hub. Even though these clients are suitable to cover a wide range of SignalR use cases, they aren’t sufficient to cover them all. Not all of our clients will be running in the browser. And not all our clients will be a part of the same web application.

In this chapter, we'll cover external SignalR clients. All of these can be set up from a standalone application of any type. The SignalR client can be set up in some background service running on an IoT device. Or it can be in the backend of a mobile app.

The chapter consists of the following topics:

• Setting up .NET client.

• Launching the .Net client.

• Setup of Java client.

• Launching java SignalR client.

• Setting up a raw WebSocket client.

• Launching WebSocket client.

By the end of this chapter, we'll have learned how to use officially supported SignalR clients in a standalone application. But, on top of this, we'll have learned how to get a bare WebSocket to communicate with a SignalR server. This knowledge will give us the ability to write our own SignalR client in any language that isn’t officially supported.