SignalR was created in 2011 and brought into the ASP.NET project in 2013 to address issues with real-time communication over the web. It was rewritten in 2018 to no longer rely on jQuery and to support cross-platform usage. SignalR uses various transport protocols like WebSockets, Server-Sent Events, and long polling to provide real-time functionality like broadcasting, multicasting, groups and bidirectional communication in a scalable way both on-premises and in the cloud using services like Azure SignalR Service.