The goal – how to create a basic forum discussion site

Forums have been around since the dawn of computing, taking on many forms: bulletin board systems, user groups, and also web-based forums on different sites. In this chapter, we'll build our own forum and light it up with SignalR, improving the overall user experience and also scalability of the solution. We'll use the top-level abstraction within SignalR called a hub. The hub enables us to expose methods from the server directly to the client and also makes it possible to call functions on the client side from the server directly.

By the end of the chapter, you'll understand the basics of SignalR and how to use the top-level abstraction: hub. Also, you will briefly look at what MVC gives you in combination with Entity Framework.

So, let's just jump straight into it!

Hub

At the core level of SignalR sits something called a PersistentConnection class; hubs build on top of this. We won't be covering PersistentConnection...