I'm writing a web server app for the first time, and I'm not really sure that I know what I'm doing. Basically I have some server side C# code and a native iOS app. I need to be able to push updates from the server to the app. The method which we have decided to use is Long Polling, and I can see three ways of doing this:
1) Writing my own web server in C# - not neccesarily tempting as it requires re-inventing the wheel
2) Using WCF - I've seen a few articles about how to implement long polling over WCF, but the tutorials that I've seen all seem to use clients which are implemented in .NET WCF which is not applicable for me as I need to use an iOS app.
3) Something else, possibly using IIS - I don't really know where to begin with this option.
Can anyone recommend a good tutorial, or exemplar project which uses standard HTTP to implement long polling with a C# server? So long as it's using standard HTTP, I'm confident with the iOS side of things.
Obviously if there's an even neater way of doing things then I'm all ears as well.
I would highly recommend that you investigate SignalR which allows you to achieve exactly what you are after. There are many iOS tutorials as well as HTML / JavaScript and of course C#.
One of the benefits of SignalR is that it tries to use the best technology available on the various devices and down-grades until it works. So, will start with Web Sockets for example and fail down to long-polling if nothing better is available.