Andy Butland

This is the last of a three part series of posts on BackgammonR – an online Backgammon game built with SignalR. If you haven’t read it already, please see Part 1 – Game Engine and Part 2 – Server Side SignalR The first bit of JavaScript to note is not actually something you write, rather what SignalR generates in order for it to allow for the messages to be passed between client and server and vice versa. It’s at /signalr/hubs/ and if you view it you’ll can see how the methods defined on the server-side hub are exposed to the client. The script I have written though lives in /public/site/backgammon.js and whilst it consists of a number of methods it can be considered in three main sections. Data Binding Before getting into the client-side SignalR code it’s worth flagging up the other libraries I’ve used here. Jquery of course. But also knockout , which provides a nice separation between the intricacies of the UI and the details of the client-side model manipulated in co...

This is the second of a three part series of posts on BackgammonR – an online Backgammon game built with SignalR. If you haven’t read it already, please see Part 1 – Game Engine . SignalR actually provides two abstractions above the base technologies for maintaining persistent connections between browser and server. One is fairly low-level, called PersistentConnection that I didn’t look into. The other is Hubs . I have a single SignalR hub called GameNotificationHub which inherits from Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Hub and thus obtains its base functionality. Within that class you can create public methods, which – once SignalR has worked its magic – become end-points that can be called from the client-side JavaScript. They all return void though – which initially seems counter-intuitive and not what you would do were you wiring up an end-point for an AJAX request for example. However the point is of course that with this type of application we may need to push responses to th...

There’s no doubt who the cool kid on the block is when it comes to the “one ASP.Net” stack – SignalR , a library created to simplify the process of creating responsive applications that push AND receive notifications from the server. It provides a wrapper around a range of technologies that can provide persistent or semi-persistent connections, choosing the best available when the full chain from browser to server is taken into account. Wanting to look into this technology with a project that’s at least semi-real, I was inspired by an article in a recent edition of the digital magazine Dot Net Curry where the author created a game of noughts and crosses (or tick-tac-toe). Chess was going to be beyond me for sure, but I figured a game of Backgammon might be feasible to get running. Hence BackgammonR – for some reason all apps using the technology need to end with a capital R. The application I’ve built so far so far is running here on Azure . And code should anyone want to look...