Locking things down

Security is something all applications need to have a relationship with, in one way or another. For instance, let's look at the type of chat application we're building. You might want to have private chat rooms or the entire chat to be private. You might have operations that are only allowed by users of a certain role. Luckily, SignalR has out-of-the-box support for the most common scenarios, and is very extensible if you'd like more complex solutions than the ones that are out-of-the-box. This chapter will take you through enabling forms authentication, a common scenario for applications. You could use Windows authentication and others as well, but for our application, we're using forms. In this chapter, we're hand-rolling everything ourselves; it will give you an idea of what is happening for security. As an alternative, you could go for something such as ASP.NET Identity. The way that you secure your SignalR artifacts would still be the same...