Web Dev Futures Day Session 5: Building real-time apps with WebSockets

Almost all HTML5 and web applications today make use of AJAX to communicate between client and server. AJAX is great with asynchronous operations, but what about real-time communication? How would you push a message from server to client? HTML5 WebSockets offer a solution to all of these questions but are not supported in every browser and every network environment. SignalR is the new cool kid on the block: it leverages WebSockets when supported and falls back to different mechanisms when they aren’t. In this session, I’ll show you where and how to use SignalR to create rich real-time applications in the browser. No toothpaste. Just code.
You can have Websocket support on windows with nodejs
and speaking of nodejs, you also have something called socket.io
That is correct! I would not use SignalR with nodjes as there's plenty of similar stuff for nodejs out there. But if you want a .NET stack, SignalR will do fine.