I’m a bit late on this, but I wanted to document my experience at the Philly.Net Fall 2012 Code Camp.  This is a wrap-up post that I need to write more often, as these events are awesome ways to get connected and inspired from some of the developers in the community.

This year, I was caught between jobs for the Code Camp event.  This was the first time that I introduced myself as an “Independent Software Developer”.  I’m not sure how I felt about that.. but not something I need to worry about any longer.

My presentation this fall was “An Introduction to SignalR”.  I have posted my sample code and slidedeck on GitHub at:  https://github.com/csharpfritz/IntroSignalR 

This talk covered the concepts of what the “Realtime web” is and I ran through Damian Edwards excellently simple “Move Shape” demo.  This demo, for those who haven’t seen it, shows how to transmit information from one browser to another through the webserver with no interaction in the other browser.  During the talk, we did a deep-dive on the network interaction between browser and server as well as discussed how SignalR is designed to failover network connectivity based on client capabilities.

I showed a simple console application that could be configured with the SignalR  client library to listen for events from an Asp.Net webserver.  This strategy allows the client to stay connected over the network through network port 80, and thus require no changes to firewalls to maintain connectivity.

Finally, we wrapped up the session by bringing up the fun MMO sample game “ShootR” in our browsers and showing that realitime communications on the web can even power an “Asteroids-like” game.  You can find ShootR at:  http://shootr.signar.net

If there’s some interest, I’ll record a screencast covering this topic and post it here in the weeks ahead.  I will probably write up the content of the talk as a ‘How-To post’ in the next week or so, after I move the blog to its new home.

Finally, I am currently putting together a mid-level SignalR talk that will discuss using SignalR with WebForms and vendor’s control sets.  I hope to give this talk in the Spring at a user group near you.