Purchase ASP.NET MVC Chat

Question

Hi everybody

I am developing an application in asp.net mvc where i need to have Chat application intergrated in the web page. The chat application should be able to support group chat, private chat, simple file transfer and user should be able to create their own rooms.

Can u people tell me where i can buy a simple chat application with above functionalities. I need it immediately.

or

you could just suggest how to create my own application. The technology to use or just any idea to start.

As i said, i need this immediately, buying asp.net chat application with above functionalities is the best option.

and most important i should be able to integrate chat application in my existing MVC project. We are using ASP.NET MVC, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Linq To Sql as database interaction tech and C#.

Thanks

Answer 1

If you need it "immediately" writing your own is pretty much out of the question. Creating a reliable chat service from the ground up takes time.

Pure ASP.Net (technically HTTP) chat services are highly unreliable. Even Facebook's and Google's HTTP chat clients despite their best efforts still have their issues. What you should be looking for is a Flash/Silverlight control of some kind.

If you're willing to forgo the file transfer capabilities there are a myriad of IRC clients that are capable of everything else you mentioned and IRC Servers range from cheap to free.

Answer 2

I wouldn't expect to find many commercial options for ASP.NET MVC based chat rooms, since platform is still quite young, plus most buyers would be able to use an "old fashioned" ASP.NET chat application (which is already widely available).

If you need something now, and you are willing to pay, I would say: buy an ASP.NET Forms chat and do a bit of plumbing to make it work against your user repository etc. I know of CuteChat, which is capable of doing this kind of integrating, but many components are likely to provide this feature.

Should you decide to build a chat application yourself - something that does not sound like a viable solution for something you need immediately - you might want to have a look at the AspComet library, which provides a service layer on top of ASP.NET to help you use COMET techniques (long polling etc).

Answer 3

Hi,

I've recently published an opensource chatting application over at CodePlex. It takes inspiration from Google Talk as well as Facebook chat. Its opensource so you could take the fundamental functionality and extend it to support the whole community

Check it out @ http://aspnetjquerychat.codeplex.com/