How to Build a Real-time Voting App with .NET and C#

You can easily build a live real-time voting app in the browser with C# and .NET, enabling users to vote and see results, updated in real time.

Have you ever thought of implementing the C# PubNub API with ASP.NET MCV4? Whether you have or not, in this tutorial, we’ll walk you through how to build a web-based real-time voting application. This will enable users to vote, and the results will be automatically tallied and displayed. We’ll be using the PubNub C# SDK for both publish() and DetailedHistory to demo the voting web app.

In a real-time application, we expect the question and the choice of answers/responses come from a database. To keep things simple, I’ll hard code the questions and answer options as a xml string in GetActivePollQuestion() method of SampleData class. In real-time, you can return dynamic data as xml string.

Check out our simple real-time voting app below to get a better idea of what you’ll be building. Or feel free to take a look at the real-time voting GitHub Repo:

Schemas for a Real-time Voting App

Two schemas PollQuestion.xsd and PollUserAnswer.xsd were created.

PollQuestion.cs and PollUserAnswer.cs class files were generated using xsd.exe tool using the following commands:

Take a look at their schemas below:

Publishing Messages over WebSockets for Real-time Voting

The Publish<string>() method is being used to save the poll answers. The following code saves the answers.

Once the poll answers are submitted to PubNub, the success status of message publish will be displayed as view to the web user as below:

Subscribing to Real-time Voting User Submissions over WebSockets

The Subscribe<string>() method is being used to receive poll answers in real time via an automatically negotiated protocol like WebSockets, HTTP Streaming, HTTP Long-polling, TCP Streaming and more with automatic recovery of dropped messages. We’ve made it easy for you to get started by providing this easy-to-use SDK.