Silverlight 2 and WCF

I have been working with Silverlight 2 and WCF the past few days so I thought Id post some ramblings on the topic. The SL2 System.ServiceModel only contains a subset of WCF functionality, a few things I noticed right off the bat when connecting to some of our existing services:

– Only BasicHttpBinding (no WS* protocols)

– Does not support FaultContracts

– All service calls are Async (a good thing :))

Another thing to note is the service security model, since were now running on the client. Currently the *service* has to grant permission to be accessed by an SL2 app, this is similar to flash model and uses the same standard crossdomainxml.org. It was pretty easy to enable the policy once I knew what was going on.

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc189008(vs.95).aspx

http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc197955(VS.95).aspx

 

On a side note, I found some awesome skins while reading Brad Abrams blog from Corina, who is the lead designer of the SL2 controls. Silly easy to get a killer looking app. Here is my demo control using the Red skin I kyped:

 

I can’t tell you how good it felt to be back in a *stateful* programming environment again after working in asp.net clients for the last year+.

SL2 rocks, game over.