WCF service as a proxy for publishing real-time data to a WPF/MVVM clients

Question

I've been tasked with creating a dashboard application to show real time updates for our servers. The raw data comes in from an XML file on our intranet which I need to parse and present to the user.

It is not an option to have every user of the dashboard pull this XML file at the same time for their updates. From what I have been reading, I need to use a WCF service to consume the XML file server side and then have it push updates to all clients who are looking at the service.

I need it to be scalable, there will be around 20 concurrent users at the start but I will need to scale to hundreds in the future. I will need to update from the XML file every 30 seconds to 1 minute.

Am I on the right track with WCF? Are there other options that I should consider?

Answer 1

A better approach may be to use SignalR, you could create a SignalR Hub which the clients connect to and it could push the data to the connected clients rather than them having to poll for it.

Answer 2

Are you intending that the WCF service will read the XML, perform processing on it, and serve up massaged data to the WPF clients?

If not, I'm not sure what benefit you will get from a WCF service. Why not just have the XML file on a webserver and have the WPF clients make an HTTP request for it?