(Simple) Push Notification using REST with Silverlight 4?

What is the best way to implement a push notification service using RESTful WCF services with Silverlight 4 clients?

We are currently using a polling technique to call the REST service for updates. I'd prefer to have the server push, or broadcast, th开发者_如何学Ce notifications.

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For the sake of closure, I thought I'd share what we ended up doing.

We did create a push notification server running as a Windows Service using standard Sockets communication. We maintain a list of connected clients and push notifications out as needed.

It's not RESTful, but since the client isn't making requests, it didn't make much sense to implement in a RESTful manner.

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You could try using Pusher (who I work for) and our Silverlight library. See: http://pusher.com/docs/client_libraries#dotnet

Update: Since you state you can't use a hosted service and you don't want to use WebSockets (although I'd still suggest WebSockets are the best option) you can get HTTP Streaming to work reliably. I'd recommend you use a dedicated realtime server for your push notifications if you need to scale your application. You can find a bunch of realtime self-hosted solutions list here: http://www.leggetter.co.uk/real-time-technologies-guide

Twitter use Jetty for their HTTP Streaming API (Firehose etc.) so it will provide a scalable and reliable solution.

Happy to provide more information if you can elaborate further on your question.