Frictionless WCF Service Consumption in Silverlight: Part 1

Introduction

This article will show you how to consume plain WCF services in Silverlight without the need to statically generate code for a service proxy (a.k.a. VS Add Service Reference wizard).

Background

While the recommended (by Microsoft) way to implement interaction with server-side in Silverlight is to use WCF RIA Services, I've found it to be very limiting. In fact, it wasn't working well with the way our EF entities are decorated. Some of the additional code attributes we've introduced for localization support have references to types that are not entities themselves, thus the code generation tool (invoked because of the presence of the WCF RIA Services Link) had merely ignored them, leaving us with non-compilable code. Also, poor support for DMZ-based deployment scenarios forced us to find other ways to deal with the problem. Instead of "fighting with the tool", I've decided to go the well-known route and simply use plain WCF Services. That decision, in its turn, introduced some friction, which I've set to eliminate within this article series.

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