Pop-up messages how?

[Guy Dillen]

i'm developing an ASP.NET C# application where you need to have the
possibility selecting a user (in a list) and sending him/her a
(text)message. The message sent should popup (or be listed) at the
recipients side.
What is the best way to achieve this (Peer2Peer system, storing the message
in SQL Server, ...)?
Thanks for any info.

Guy

 

[Scott Allen]

P2P would be the way to make this happen in (near) real time.

With ASP.NET you would need a page that is just going to sit and
refresh every x seconds. There is no way for a web server to reach out
to the client and tell them a message has arrived, the client has to
poll the server.

 

[John Timney \(ASP.NET MVP\)]

The typical approach would be to wrap the alerter service and send via NET
SEND. Search google for some examples.

Regards

John

 

[Guy Dillen]

Scott,

What about:
1. storing the popup messages in a SQL Server db, and when refreshing the a
page pop-up'ing the respective messages?
or
2. using Application state?

Guy

 

[Scott Allen]

Using the database would be a robust approach. Application state keeps
all the entries in memory, as soon as someone changes the web.config
file and restarts the web application all the messages are gone.