Josh Wieder

A few months ago, I wrote a post about websockets and IIS7 , explaining how some extensive hacking is needed to get websockets working and providing a link to an application that would accomplish just that. That post was very popular - Microsoft developers are obviously looking for ways to implement web sockets, and there is not a lot of documentation out there to assist them yet. With the release of Windows Server 2012, Microsoft is now including native suppor t for WebSockets. Unfortunately the 2008 hack (released by HTML5Labs) is now deprecated, and has been removed from the developer's website. Because there is so much interest, and no longer a fix to implement websockets in IIS7 that I am readily aware of, I am going to start putting together some information for developers here on IIS8. This post will just have the basics, and I will expand on the topic through later posts. To get started, it is necessary to enable the WebSocket Protocol Module. The module is available as a

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