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Microsoft’s Sourabh Shirhatti announced the first preview of ASP.NET Core 2.2 has been released. Developers interested in experimenting with this on their local machines may obtain it from the usual Microsoft sources. Do note that if you would like to try this out with Visual Studio, you should be sure to be using VS2017 15.9 Preview 1.

This preview features many new additions to ASP.NET Core, but it should be noted that many are in early stages of development and not considered complete. Microsoft’s Mikael Mengistu provides details about one of them, the addition of a SignalR client written in Java. This functionality provides developers with the ability to write Android apps (or any Java-based application) to connect to a ASP.NET Core server implementing SignalR. Microsoft has provided a brief sample on GitHub demonstrating this new functionality.

Microsoft’s Mikael Mengistu does caution that there are several areas of the functionality that are currently limited but planned for expansion in the future prior to the full release of ASP.NET Core 2.2. Among the limitations:

• Only primitive types can be accepted as parameters and return types.
• The APIs are synchronous.
• Only the “Send” call type is supported at this time, “Invoke” and streaming return values are not supported.
• The client does not currently support the Azure SignalR Service.
• Only the JSON protocol is supported.
• Only the WebSockets transport is supported.

As a result of the development work yet to come, the sample code is rather sparse. This will hopefully receive greater details as the functionality of the Java client is expanded.