Deploying a real-time chat feature is rarely as simple as "write the hub, start the connection, and ship it." After a full day of chasing ghosts in SignalR, JavaScript event handlers, and an nginx reverse proxy, here is what actually happened — and what finally made it work.

Over the past few days, I tackled a series of production issues on my .NET 10 Razor Pages blog while simultaneously adding SEO enhancements and user management features. What started as mysterious upload failures evolved into a deep dive into nginx configuration, deployment automation, Entity Framework Core migrations, and full-stack feature development. This post documents those challenges, solutions, and the lessons I learned along the way.

Before a .NET Core 2.x web application can run under IIS, several configuration steps must be completed. Unlike classic ASP.NET, .NET Core apps rely on the ASP.NET Core Module and the Hosting Bundle to forward IIS traffic to the Kestrel web server.