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.
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.
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