I decided to move to the latest version of signalr but i facing a few issues. First of all the way to register routes has entirely changed; so i tried to do it the way that
I was able to get the 2.0 beta working by
Removing all references to the older version of SignalR, ie nuget uninstall of the library and double checking /bin
Installed SignalR 2.0.0-beta2 via Package Manager Console Install-Package Microsoft.AspNet.SignalR -Pre
Following the steps in the 1.x to 2.0 migration outlined in the ops link
And most importantly changing the project config to use Local IIS Web server instead of Visual Studio Developer Server (Cassini).
More info in the question/answer I posted here