Silverlight + WCF Polling Duplex Services = Awesomeness

Silver light + WCF Polling Duplex services enables you to write Silver light apps that can share information almost real time between users, over HTTP. Last weekend I started experimenting with Tomasz's pubsub sample - And again, this weekend, I ended up coding for the past 12-16 hours, and packaged together a not so bad Real time White board - Silver Draw -  where users can chat and even draw some primitive drawing.

If you are interested, here is the same. If my wife permits me to spend a couple of hours in front of my box this sunday, I'll do some quick refactoring to clean up the code a bit more- and may publish the source with another detailed article. In this Video, you may see I'm logging in from two different browsers, to do some dirty drawing that gets pumped to the other user.

I think recently there is lot of excitement about Google Wave, mainly because of it's ability to share information between various users real time, over HTTP. Real time information sharing is not new - but note that point - " over HTTP" - which makes it accessible to a wider audience.

(Some time back, to understand how Wave works, I even made a small Wave Robot based on Jon Skeet's API - Read about the same here if you missed it.)

Long point made short - If you are in MS camp, and if you are looking forward to develop RIA apps that can seamlessly share information between users real time, you may have a look at Silverlight + WCF Polling Duplex. I still need to explore scaling and performance related aspects