Important
Is WebSockets still maintained?
It can be easy to assume that no activity on a repository and/or no updates in a long time means that a project has been abandoned. That is absolutely not the case here! See the Contributing section below.
The reality is that this package is designed to fix an issue that isn't going to change, so we might go long stretches between updates, if there's ever another one needed at all. That's driven by a few things:
- .NET Framework 4.6.2, while still supported by Microsoft as part of Windows, is a stable, feature-frozen target that Microsoft's ongoing .NET investment has moved past.
- .NET 5.0 is out of official support - but we chose that target so that we could provide support for all future .NET versions.
- Microsoft treats this as intended behavior rather than a defect to patch, so there's no reason to expect it to disappear on its own in some future .NET release.
- Given that nothing here is expected to change, there's nothing that would obviously require this package to change either.
You can rest assured that this package will continue to be maintained if any issues are ever reported or new features requested.
This repo hosts a small family of .NET WebSocket packages: WebSockets, a ClientWebSocket replacement that fixes a specific, durable handshake-validation bug present across every version of .NET, and WebSockets.Resilience, an optional reconnection and resilience layer built on top of it. See Packages below, or each package's own README, for details.
| Package | Description |
|---|---|
WebSockets |
A ClientWebSocket replacement that fixes its overly strict Connection response-header validation, with fully overridable handshake validation. |
WebSockets.Resilience |
Reconnection, configurable backoff, and a send queue that survives reconnect gaps, layered on top of WebSockets. |
.NET Standard isn't planned. Both implementations in this repo work by reusing each platform's own native WebSocket machinery rather than reimplementing the protocol from scratch, and neither of the APIs they depend on for that (SocketsHttpHandler on modern .NET, WebSocket.RegisterPrefixes/CreateClientWebSocket on .NET Framework) exist behind a netstandard2.x contract. Supporting it would mean either abandoning the actual fix for that target, or building a third, from-scratch implementation. Neither is worth it for the demand that exists today.
Android, iOS, Mac Catalyst, and tvOS aren't currently targeted, though the existing net5.0 build likely already works fine on them unchanged: ClientWebSocket uses the same shared managed implementation across all of modern .NET, nothing in our code is desktop-specific. We just haven't had a reason to add and properly validate (workload installs, trim/AOT checks) these targets yet. If you need this, open an issue, that's exactly the kind of concrete signal that turns "probably fine" into "actually supported."
Full documentation is at https://scottoffen.github.io/websockets.
Engage in our community discussions for Q&A, ideas, and show and tell!
We welcome contributions from the community! In order to ensure the best experience for everyone, before creating an issue or submitting a pull request, please see the contributing guidelines and the code of conduct. Failure to adhere to these guidelines can result in significant delays in getting your contributions included in the project.
We use SemVer for versioning. For the versions available, see the tags on this repository.
You can generate and open a test coverage report by running the following command in the project root:
pwsh ./test-coverage.ps1Note
This is a Powershell script. You must have Powershell installed to run this command.
WebSockets is dual-licensed under the MIT License and the Apache License 2.0. You may use it under either license.
Few things are as satisfying as hearing that your open source project is being used and appreciated by others. Jump over to the discussion boards and share the love!