Silverlight: Best practices for accessing enterprise data

Question

I am starting to put together a system architecture document for a new project at my company. Basically we have a rather large business layer that follows the enterprise library data pattern, and i will need to access these data objects from a new silverlight application.

My question is what is the best way to gain access to these objects in silverlight? My initial idea is using WCF, but i am unsure of how to best to reconstruct the objects in the client.

Answer 1

The new .net standard is WCF (codename indigo)

for performance You have the choice of a few transport protocols tcp (being the fastest), http, https, depending on your security/message encryption level. (there are a few more as well, netpipe's, etc)

my typical endpoint/service layout with my projects, i have one endpoint for each version of the service, so if its version 1 then i end it with http://localhost:8080/YourEnterpriseName/Project/Version1/

I have also found that the response/request method is the best way of requesting data where you have a 2 classes (one request, one response) for every call you would need to make to the server. (using knowntype, i ca fill you in later)

Also Shawn Wildermuth & Miguel Castro have done podcasts on dnrtv http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=127 on Silverlight Data http://www.dnrtv.com/default.aspx?showNum=122 on Extreme WCF

Answer 2

Check out this book, Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2. I found this to be the best resource for figuring this out. What I did was create a lightweight WCF layer that retrieves objects from an existing DAL and then passes those objects back to the client.