What frameworks should I use to facilitate real time updates with Asp.Net?

We are at the very early stages of planning a new app in work. The app will receive real time updates where appropriate. In house we use .Net and IIS hosted on Microsoft Servers. Up until now we have been developing using Asp.Net MVC5, with c# and the usual suite of front end fare such as js, jquery, bootstrap etc.

In order to realise and harness the potential of real time updates, I have been looking at the various technologies currently available to meet the new requirement. Firstly I'd like to use our own hosted MQTT to handle messaging. We are already trialling Mosquitto on a Linux server vm. I have refactored some of our key production libs to include mqtt publishing. This is working fine. We can spin up console app clients and subscribe to topics and see real time updates.

Now I want to start working on getting those updates into a web page in or near real time. I have looked at Web Sockets on their own. I am now looking at signalR as a more complete framework to address the issue. On looking further into signalR, it seems that I can go down two paths; Asp.Net classic with signalR or Asp.Net-core with signalR. I am told that core is the way to go.

So I am leaning towards the following

• MQTT
• Asp.Net core 3.1 (will require training)
• signalR (Will require training).

Would you agree with this? or is there a simpler faster way to get events and updates onto a web page in real time bearing in mind our in house tech stack.

My thanks in advance for any advice.