6 Ways to Build Real-Time .NET Apps (And When Each One Actually Makes Sense)

We are at the stage where we need to select the best real-time communication method for our .NET applications and we can’t read all about everything.. I see the problem, so I made the solution for you, so that you don’t need to go here and there to make your decision..

First Deicide! [Framework]

Do you need bidirectional communication?
├── YES → Consider WebSockets/SignalR
└── NO → Do you control both systems?
    ├── YES → Consider Server-Sent Events/Long Polling
    └── NO → Consider WebHooks/Polling

Again,

Low Complexity, Good Performance → HTTP Polling, WebHooks

Medium Complexity, Great Performance → Server-Sent Events, Long Polling

High Complexity, Excellent Performance → WebSockets, SignalR

Max Complexity, Max Performance → Custom protocols, Message Queues

But the question that actually matters is about the latency tolerance, which is whether it's a few seconds, sub-second, or a minute. The next thing is about the connection status — is it always connected, event-driven, or batch updates? and other things we can consider is infrastructure control, scalability req., and the development time.. and bla bla bla…🔻