questions on developing a web form chat system

[dec21st]

* a question about asp.net

i'm trying to develop a basic chat system for my system.

[question one]
i'm trying to figure out how to populate a list to show who's connected to my webserver. it is something like what you see on most forums (php ones mostly) at the bottom where u can see active users connected or using the system

is there a way to retrieve information of users anyhow? by session or whatever ways....

how are they thing usually done?

[question two]

how are chat system usually done using webforms... (internet based)

 

[TPM]

Although you could do this with an aspx form it's not a good idea. What you must realize is that aspx code all runs at the server and has no direct way to communicate with the client (as in sending events etc). So you'd have to set you page to refresh every few seconds so the messages would be up to date. This would cause quite a lot of unnecessary postbacks, and if you had more than a few clients would probably bring your server to it's knees. I'd recomend using client side script, something like Java.