Get Serializable Object from Session in Silverlight

Question

I have a complex, [Serializable] object stored in session. I have Silverlight 3.0 islands in my .aspx pages that need access to this data and its data type. It is my understanding that Silverlight does not support [Serializable], and since it is running on the client, it does not have easy access to session. I am looking for a solid way to access this data in my Page.xaml.cs file.

I am open to storing it in ISO Storage once it has been retrieved, but how to retrieve, read it from Silverlight? Hidden fields are not an option as it is a complex data type with dozens of properties, and a few dictionaries, lists of other objects.

Answer 1

The classic way of accessing this type of data would be with a silverlight-enabled WCF service on the ASP.NET site that accesses the data. You then add a service-reference from the silverlight client and ask the server for data (asynchronously).

Note that by default this will be a separate object model (proxies from "mex"). If you need the same type you'll have to repeat the code in the client (you can't really use assembly sharing between client and server here).

I don't know whether the silverlight version of svcutil will allow type re-use (the regular version does), but if not another option is to just return xml or binary from the service and deserialize locally. One option here would be something like protobuf-net.