I have tried something with node.js in windows vista/IIS 7 using iis node. My idea is to use a server script on the asp .net mvc application to connect to another socket server and serve requests on a persistent fashion.
I downloaded the iisnode version at https://github.com/tjanczuk/iisnode for IIS 7 and able to run the basic 'hello world' http server pipe using http handler mappings in web.config and IIS modules configuration.
I am trying to use socket.io library from node.js. This works independently if I write a server and client. But fails when used with IIS node.
I am having problems going down further. Problems like
- How to include the npm modules in the asp .net mvc project? I tried
putting the node_modules in the folder of node scripts, but that did
not help. Basically the require('socket.io') command works, but the
socket connection etc., simply fails.
- How to have a socket
connection from client which will keep listening for updates from
server(like COMET) - As I said I am trying to use socket.io
Any body tried this before?
Reading back a few months ago, WebSocket support is not supported with Socket.IO under IIS, however long polling is.
This was a few months ago, and I'm running up against the same issue now and trying to resolve.
As Tomasz writes:
Please note that iisnode does not support websocket transport, but
using socket.io is still possible with other HTTP-based transports
like HTTP long polling:
io.configure(function() {
io.set('transports', ['xhr-polling']);
});
By the looks of it, as of Feb 23, 2012, this functionality is still not supported.
Do you need to go through IIS? Do you have the option of going with a pure Socket.IO/Node option, eliminating IISNode? If you need full WebSocket support with fallback capability, this looks like the only option, unless there are other suggestions?
This may or may not be related to your problem. I haven't done much with socket.io, however I was planing to do something very similar to what you're describing. When reading through the source for iisnode, I found the following code in cnodehttpmodule.cpp:
this->applicationManager->GetEventProvider()->Log(L"iisnode received a new http request", WINEVENT_LEVEL_INFO);
// reject websocket connections since iisnode does not support them
// http://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-ietf-hybi-thewebsocketprotocol-17#page-17
PCSTR upgrade = pHttpContext->GetRequest()->GetHeader(HttpHeaderUpgrade, NULL);
ErrorIf(upgrade && 0 == strcmp("websocket", upgrade), ERROR_NOT_SUPPORTED);
It looks to me as though if "websocket" is included in the header of the request, it will be rejected. I would need to read up on the websocket protocol to better understand exactly what this means.
I'll be the first to admit that I don't know overly well how websockets differ from a long running request. As I understand it, however, socket.io will work on older browsers that do not support websockets.
I recommend you try to set the transport to just xhr-polling or jsonp-polling. It kinda defeats the cool factor of using node.js but it might help you reach a resolution to your problem.
If your socket.io web application is hosted in an IIS virtual directory, socket.io configuration must be modified compared to a self-hosted case. Please see http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2013/01/hosting-socketio-websocket-apps-in-iis.html for details.
Also, as of version 0.2.x, iisnode does support WebSockets on Windows 8 and Windows Server 2012 with IIS 8. Check out http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2012/11/how-to-use-websockets-with-nodejs-apps.html for details.
