Has anyone spent much time working with signalR in a VB/ASP.Net environment?

I'm working on a project for work and I am having one heck of a time wrapping my head around signalR since every tutorial is C# and JavaScript.

I've spent the years here at work adding on to our corporate intranet extracting data from our MS SQL database that is mostly populated by our ERP. Through traditional t-sql statements on an internal website I display different forms, and mix in a little Crystal reports as well.

What I've been tasked to do is put a computer monitor at 8 different locations around the plant in different departments. I'll be using some old pc stock to have each station look at a single page on our intranet. What they want to show is a few different items on each screen. RSS news feeds, weather report but most important will be messages entered by department heads about company news, announcements and production scheduling.

So I've set up a couple of simple tables in our database and each department head will use CKEditor on a secure webpage to enter simple html messages. The department head will be able to assign play order and a display duration for each message in seconds depending on how large the message is. There will be a mix of both company wide, and department specific messages displayed on each screen.

So I'm using a URL query string to assign a location for each client when they first visit the page on boot-up.

So now, I'm just looking to set up signalR to push content to each department computer (client) and have it display for the time duration set and as the day progresses have new department and company wide messages show up on the screens.

I'm not looking for someone to write this for me, I'm just looking for a starting point that makes sense. My VB programming skills are at an intermediate level, maybe slightly above.