We Keep Coding

what to use for instant messaging capabilities?

I am appearing for the microsoft exam 70-486. While going through the dumps I came across the below question
You are developing an ASP.NET MVC application that provides instant messaging capabilities to customers.
You have the following requirements:
Messages must be able to be sent and received simultaneously.
Latency and unnecessary header data must be eliminated.
The application must comply with HTML5 standards.
You need to design the application to meet the requirements.
What should you do?
A. Configure polling from the browser.
B. Implement long-running HTTP requests.
C. Implement WebSockets protocol on the client and the server.
D. Instantiate a MessageChannel object on the client.
Now I am confused between C and D options. On the web, most of the people are saying C is the answer but as far as I know it won't satisfy the 1st requirement
"Messages must be able to be sent and received simultaneously".
Any help would be appreciable .
Thankyou

Coming from previous experience building instant messaging functionality into a social network web app. Here are some technologies to look at:
SignalR (For communication between the server and client)
Bootstrap (Page layout and styling, with HTML5 compliance)
ReactJS (Ease of use when handling requests, and displaying messages)
Try building a small test application and work out for yourself which technologies work well.

Correct answer would be Option D

SignalR and WebAPI, why use a combination of the two?

I'm trying to create a new application from the ground up. I've used SignalR and WebAPI. I believe I know a lot of the differences, but isn't SignalR faster since it uses websockets? WebAPI makes sense to me for external frameworks to be able to reuse. SignalR makes sense to me for anything I'm not necessarily going to use externally. I've done some research and I can't find anywhere it says you shouldn't. I realize this is somewhat opinion-based, but why would you use a mix of the two rather than just SignalR?
I think what I'm mostly asking is if it is wrong to use SignalR to send back to the caller, except in cases where I would send to other clients on that channel? To me SignalR can be used like WebAPI when you are just sending back to the client. Is that wrong to do? It is less code for the client calls(2 lines vs 6 or more, depending on what I'm doing with it). My thinking is I may be trying to manipulate data and send it to the caller now, but maybe I want to send it to all clients later or send a notification to all clients. I'm not a fan of using signalR calls in my webApi controllers. It just feels like the signalR calls should be in the Hub. Thanks for your help.

There is no reason why you shouldn't use them together because they target two different problems. Web-API is a means of making web services easy to target by many different kind of apps/devices whereas SignalR offers bi-directional communications in a way that the Server can call a piece of code on the client without the client having to keep polling the server for results.
E.g. Instead of having a client keep asking the Server for any new messages (like facebook notifications) with SignalR the server knows that there are new notifications for a specific client and it can send them directly without the client having to ask for them.
http://www.asp.net/web-api
ASP.NET Web API is a framework that makes it easy to build HTTP
services that reach a broad range of clients, including browsers and
mobile devices. ASP.NET Web API is an ideal platform for building
RESTful applications on the .NET Framework.
http://www.asp.net/signalr
ASP.NET SignalR is a new library for ASP.NET developers that makes
developing real-time web functionality easy. SignalR allows
bi-directional communication between server and client. Servers can
now push content to connected clients instantly as it becomes
available. SignalR supports Web Sockets, and falls back to other
compatible techniques for older browsers. SignalR includes APIs for
connection management (for instance, connect and disconnect events),
grouping connections, and authorization.
A potential problem is that while SignalR is great at targeting JavaScript code on a client, Web-Api enables connectivity with all sorts of platforms and devices. So the same techniques used through SignalR to target Web Browsers, will not necessarily work on a native Android App.

You can use them together depending on your application needs. I recommend you look at difference between HTTP and WebSockets protocols. WebApi uses HTTP(S), SignalR mostly WebSockets and in some cases others transports. They both have benefits and disadvantages. The main benefits of using SignalR are duplex bidirectional communication as mentioned above and low traffic overheads. Browsers send as a rule a few KB data in HTTP headers and cookies for every request.
It’s easier to use RESTfull services (HTTP) from browsers, HTTP clients, tools, languages and so on instead of using WebSockets. Google Chrome supports monitoring WebSockets traffic but very poorly and Microsoft Edge doesn’t.
Many tools like Google Analytics and Microsoft Azure Application Insights can monitor errors in HTTP requests but can’t do this for WebSockets. You need to implement monitoring manually. Actually WebSockets traffic is simple messages from client to server and vise versa, no additional information. SignalR has some wrappers for this - some kind of error message format.
WebSockets also use more server resources because of keeping open TCP connection and it’s harder to scale web applications that use WebSockets. For instance if you have 100K online users it means you have to be able to keep 100K TCP connections. For HTTP – not necessary. For some very simple sceneries you can replace SignalR with some kind of client polling, but be careful that’s approach may bring a lot of problems.
So, If you don’t need bidirectional communication and traffic overhead (as a rule a few KB per request) is not a big deal then use WebApi only.
If you need bidirectional communication you can use SignalR for server to client push notifications and WebApi for client to server requests simply to ease development, scaling, debugging and using API from other sources. But you also can use SignalR only if you are ok with disadvantages of it or traffic overhead is big for you.

Approach for cross platform chat application with back-end in c#

I want to create a cross platform chat app with backend in c#
I searched for an approach to do so and found that I can do so with http requests to handlers on my server and use the response accordingly.
So till now I made the handlers which can add users, login, send and receive messages using database for storage.
Now I am making android client for that and to get messages for user I need to do http requests at a specific interval (3 seconds).
I feel it is not a good approach to do this. I am making this app for a target audience of nearly 30000. They would be able to chat one on one at a single session.
I just want to know if I am going in right direction or There is far more better ways to make chat apps using backend.
I have heard about wcf but I am not clear with what approach should I take. Please guide me about approaches for chat application.
Edit
An example of little working of any famous chat app like whats app, facebook messenger would be a great help.
Thanks.

You could do it with HTTP, but I'd suggest using TCP instead. There's a very solid base for a C# based TCP server on codereview right here which will outline how to deal with Socket objects how to handle connections properly.
The main perk of going about it this way is that you can connect your client to the server, and the client can be virtually any language, it doesn't have to be C# - as long as the language supports sockets, you'll be fine.
On top of that you can have the client listen to the server, which removes the need of polling the server for new messages every couple of seconds; the client socket will receive data when the server sends it, and you can handle it right away, nearly in real-time, whereas if you'd poll the server for new messages over HTTP every - say 3 seconds - you'll always end up with a delay in your chat service, which is something I think you will want to avoid.
See the code sample on CodeReview I linked above, and read up on how Sockets work in C#, how TCP works in terms of guarantees (TCP guarantees that whatever is sent over it will end up on the other side in the same order, but not necessarily in one packet, etc) and I'm pretty confident you'll be able to make a excellent chat app if you put it all to good use.
Edit: I just noticed the WCF tag on your post. I'd personally steer clear of it for this specific project since you want to achieve cross-platform support; try going as low-level as you possibly can for that.

php soap client and c# soap server

I am currently working on a project which I think using soap as part of it would be a good idea but I can't find how it will work in the way that I need.
I have a C# Console Application called ConsoleApp, ConsoleApp will also have a PHP web interface. What I'm thinking of doing, is the PHP web interface controls the ConsoleApp in some way, so I click a button on the web interface, then this does a sends a soap request to a soap service and then the soap service, sends the information on to the consoleApp, and the result is returned back to the SoapService and then returned back to PHP.
This seems like it would need to separate soap services, one for php to interface with and one within the ConsoleApp but this doesn't sound right, I think I might be misunderstanding the purpose of Soap.
How can this be achieved. Thanks for any help you can provide
UPDATE
As requested I thought I'd add a bit more information on what I am trying to achieve.
In the console app, it is acting as an email server sending out emails that are given to the program and then being sent on, and if it can't send it retries a couple of times until the email goes into a failed state.
The web interface will provide a status of what the email server is doing, i.e. how many emails are incoming, how many are yet to be processed, how many have sent and how many have failed.
From the web page you will be able to shutdown or restart the email server or put one of the failed emails back into the the queue to be processed.
The idea is, when the user adds a failed email back into the queue it sends a soap message that the console app will receive, add the information back into the queue, log the event in the console apps log file, increment a counter which is how it keep track of emails that need to be processed. Once this has been done it should then send a response back to the web interface to say whether or not the email was successfully added back into the queue or whether it failed for some reason.
I don't really want to keep on polling the database every so many seconds as there could be the potential for their to be a large number of emails that will be being processed so polling the database would put a large load on the MySQL server which I don't want, which is why I thought soap as the email server would only need to do something when it receives a soap request to do something.
Thanks for any help.

Every web service is going to need a client (in your case PHP) and a server (ConsoleApp). Even though there are two endpoints, it is still one web service. Your PHP will send a SOAP request which ConsoleApp will receive, process and respond to with a SOAP response.
So when someone clicks the button on the web page, you can use JavaScript to build and send the SOAP envelope in the browser. The alternative is to POST the values to a PHP page that will build and send the SOAP.
I have to admit though, your scenario sounds a unusual. I personally haven't heard of web pages talking directly with console apps. Web pages usually talk to web servers, and the servers are usually the ones issuing atypical requests, like your request to ConsoleApp. While it is technically possible, but I think it is going to be harder then you are expecting.
Personally, I would ditch SOAP in favor of a much more simple and scalable solution. Assuming you have access to a database, I would have the PHP create a record in the database when the user clicks the button. ConsoleApp would then poll the database every X seconds to look for new records. When it finds a new record, it processes it.
This has the benefit of being simple (database access is almost always easier than SOAP) and scalable (you could easily run an arbitrary number of ConsoleApps to process all of the incoming requests if you are expecting heavy loads). Also, neither the PHP page nor the ConsoleApp have a direct dependency on the other so each individual component is less likely to cause a failure in the whole system.

basic usage of service bus in website

i'm making an asp.net website to support Json request.
Each request must send a message on a ESB (actually NServiceBus) but i'm struggling with response..
I can actually receive multiple request of same type so the website send similar messages of same type on the bus. How can I be sure that each message response from the bus goes to the exact "requester"?
How can I deal with slow or no bus response?

Take a look at the AsyncPages sample that comes with NSB. That demonstrates how you can use callbacks and the async support in asp.net to build robust message based communication from a website. Callbacks is there if you need to get a response back to the webserver that sent the request (command). It's often better to have the website only send messages off and then read the result from another data store (ravendb , sqlserver etc). That will give you the chance to get at the data even if the webserver goes down (callbacks are not persistent)