How to implement long lived network connection in dotnet

Question

The idea is to have a windows service, that clients can connect to (tcp, wcf, remoting), and when the data changes in the windows service, send the changes to the clients. An example of this would be a stock pricing server, and when the price changes for instruments, send the changes to the client.

Wcf does have streaming, but is that just for streaming one big message response or can it be used for lots of small messages ?

Is sockets the only way to achieve this ?

Answer 1

All connectivity, Wcf or otherwise, do use sockets in the backend.

You may want to customize "connection timeout" and "read timeout" for the connections made.