Is it correct to use SignalR for desktop applications?
Is SignalR suitable for windows desktop applications (winforms/wpf)?
What are the advantages and disadvantages using SignalR with windows desktop applications?
Are there any performance considerations?
I want to make real-time connections between server and a lot of clients. The connections will be constant.
Answer
Is SignalR suitable for windows desktop applications (winforms/wpf)?
The answer from signalr.net is:
SignalR can be used to add any sort of "real-time" web functionality to your ASP.NET application.
(As stated correctly by others it can be self-hosted, so no need for IIS)
So the answer seems to be no. It is a server side API. But today is your lucky day, since the download of SignalR doesn't only reveal the server side API, but also a client side API called Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR.Client45 to use in your application. It works for WPF, WF or even console applications.
And even if it didn't, SignalR is just a wrapper around the WebSockets protocol, which is part of the HTTP protocol, which can be used on virtually any platform. The download also contains a sample for iOS and Xamarin for example.
What are the advantages and disadvantages using SignalR with windows desktop applications?
To have real-time notifications from and to the server.
Is there any performance problems?
That is a hard question to answer, since there is no reference point. Compared to what the performance is good or bad? Generally spoken, I don't think you have to worry to much about that. The API itself is fast, and it may prevent slow pull-requests you need to do else.