Are WCF polling duplex services usable by other clients?

Question

I'm writing a server app with a silverlight client. At some point I'd like non-silverlight clients to be able to use my services. Right now I've written some WCF services which get polled, but I'm not happy with the responsiveness. I'm thinking of switching the code over to using Silverlight/WCF duplex polling, but if I do that, will I be stuck with Silverlight as my only client? Is it better to write my own long-polling service using normal WCF http services?

Answer 1

You can find a AJAX sample here for using a WCF duplex service http://tomasz.janczuk.org/2009/09/scale-out-of-silverlight-http-polling.html

Answer 2

I don't see your issue there. You can just define another binding for use by other clients (like WsHttpDualBinding). The same server code will perform the exact same task regardless of the underlying binding. That's the whole point of using WCF.

Answer 3

By other .NET client - yes. By anything else : no. WsHttpDual is definitely NOT an interoperable protocol. It also has plenty of other drawbacks and pitfalls and I'd try to stay away from it as much as possible......

Marc