Developing Service-Oriented AJAX Applications on the Microsoft® Platform

Sample Application: Creating a Site Chat

In the following code samples, we’ll use the AjaxXmlWebPart and the XmlControl to develop a chat application that runs on a SharePoint site. The first step in the process is to create a chat protocol that runs as a REST-ful service through a simple XML endpoint.

Creating the Chat Protocol

Because WCF is not fully supported on the current SharePoint platform, we’ll follow an approach that uses HTTP handlers—however, we’ll make use of the WCF platform so that we can maintain a consistent API. By implementing the service using WCF technology, we can serve the same code through a WCF endpoint or through an HTTP handler wrapper class. We will also register the HTTP handler endpoint with the path chat.svc so that ...