In Silverlight, I call my Silverlight-enabled WCF service asynchronously to retrieve, say, a list of values for a combobox. On the server, I cache these values for performance. But I want to cache them on the client to prevent the unnecessary round-trip.
Now, I understand how to use local storage to cache them except that I do not want all of the "if in local storage, return local storage values else get values from server asynchronously" stuff in the code-behind of my xaml app.
So, I tried moving that code to a helper class but the async calls need a callback which is where I get lost. I tried passing a generic EventHandler into my helper class but the helper class method really needs to be static. So, that is throwing me off. Will my helper method need to be non-static, and, if so, do I need to worry about thread safety? Aaarh! Too many questions! Haha. Anyway, I bet some smart person out there can tell me a better way to approach this almost immediately! Thanks in advance.
views:
42answers:
1I've done one major Silverlight app in the past. It has taught me that you shouldn't fight against the system.
If I'm not mistaken, Silverlight itself uses the browser network layer to connect to the internet. So you can still leverage--and Silverlight still respects--things with proper cache-control headers and such.
So just from my experience, I'd suggest that you try to make the server component (WCF server) do proper output-caching ala ASP.NET style and the network layer in Silverlight and the hosting browser will handle caching automatically for you.
You may have better luck with RESTful WCF mode since you can leverage proper HTTP caching throughout, see this blog post: REST in WCF – Part X – Supporting Caching and Conditional GET for a start.
This also makes your code less complex, since you don't have to add yet another complex layer to your system and tame it to work with the confusing XAML binding system.