So its been about 5 months since the IETF released the RFC 6455 proposal for websockets: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6455 The websocket API is a protocol that allows for the bidirectional transfer of http/https data. This breaks down to a single initial handshake and then autonomous communication from both the server and client concurrently. With it comes a significant performance improvement (as only one handshake is needed, and client-side implementation gets much simpler) and a number of practical applications - I always think chat clients, but the applications are endless for web driven applications that require real time data transfer (HTML5 games that don't suck!) Its no secret that websockets will not work with a standard IIS7 implementation. Http.sys is a greedy bugger, and gobbles up all connections listening on port 80. Even with WCF, there is no formally recognized workaround besides "wait for 8" and the native websocket/SOAP functionality that it