I am an experienced developer in .NET but have almost no experience in the networking aspect of develompent (thankfully .NET abstracts away all the details.) My current project dictates that i need to build an instant message control for a website (internet, not intranet) that allows users to send messages to the server and have those messages be broadcast to users (similar to gmail chat).
Where to start? I have experience w/ WCF services and thought i would start there. But the question of the protocol got me. Does it *have* to be HTTP? Or can i use TCP? I have used Flash Media Server in the past and it uses a tcp protocol so i'm guessing this is possible, but are there drawbacks (firewall, etc.)? How bad is the downside to using HTTP as a stream and holding all the connections open? How does the wsDualHttp binding work in WCF and can it work for this situation?
Any help or advice/guidance on the selection of technologies would be very helpful.
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