I am searching for a solution for our Winforms application. I wonder if there is technology available that can push notifications to a .net Winforms client. What i want is that when a application starts it can retreive notifications from a php webserver.
I allready have seen things like node.js and some examples show how to push notifications to websites but not to clients. And i don't know if these technologies can be used for what i want with it. Do any of you have any experience with this ?
Thanks,
You could use ASP.NET with SignalR.
Th example on that site uses WPF but you can do exactly the same with WinForms.
Here's an overview of SignalR.
It allows you to invoke methods from the server on the client and from the client on the server.
As you can see on these web sites, SignalR has been built primarily for web applications, but there's no problem using it for a standard Winforms client.
SignalR is a good technology that can be used with a ASP.Net server side and clients like JavaScript, WinForms and WPF.
Since your server code is written in PHP, SignalR cannot be integrated directly. Instead, you may setup a Windows server with IIS 8 or above and deploy an intermediary ASP.Net website which will act like a mediator between your PHP server and the WinForm client. The WinForm client will be connected to the ASP.Net server via SignalR and its transport protocol. You can send the notification to the ASP.Net website by HTTP requests and the ASP.Net site will pass the notification to the connected clients.
This is exactly what Reactive Extensions (RX) was designed for. With RX the client "Subscribes" to the "Subject" similar to how an event handler registers a listener. It supports virtually any type and when the content is received it is "on the thread" that subscribed by default; however, you can attach it to any other thread you want. Lee Campbell wrote and excellent intro to this topic.