SignalR is one of those libraries that I first experienced back in 2012 at my second Codemash. Scott Hanselmann gave a brief overview of the library in one of his sessions and I looked over to one of my friends and said, "Man, SignalR sounds like a game-changer...I wish there was a session on THAT."

I checked out the schedule and BAM...there was a session about SignalR the next day.

Needless to say, I was extremely excited to start digging into the library and learn how to apply SignalR to existing projects.

Since then, SignalR has definitely made it's way into the Microsoft world. It's even used in the Web Essentials extension for updating a web page through Visual Studio when you make a change to CSS or HTML. You immediately see it update in the browser.

In this post, we'll walk-through a simple example of building a "Did you like this post?" widget using SignalR.

What is SignalR?
SignalR is a server-side library to add real-time functionality to your existing web applications. This also includes the ability to push notifications out to the client as they happen.

SignalR takes advantage of multiple protocols when determining how to send and receive data. First, it determines if it can use WebSockets, an HTML5 protocol. If that doesn't work then it gracefully falls back to older technology to make sure it works.

For more detailed information about how SignalR determines which technology to use, head to the Introduction to SignalR page at Microsoft.

Original Post - http://www.danylkoweb.com/Blog/how-to-make-your-own-real-time-like-button-using-aspnet-mvc-jquery-and-signalr-QF