What is the preferred way to allow Silverlight App to consume your existing stack

Question

Quick one for a silverlight noob.

I have an existing middle tier (Domain Core, Persistence, Infrastructure etc) that supports an mvc front end.

I am looking at developing a separate backend admin app in silverlight and have begun work using prism. I see that silverlight apps cannot ref non-silverlight assemblies.

What is the best way to allow silverlight to talk to the existing middle tier? I assume it may be a WCFRIA facade?

Cheers

Answer 1

Your assumption is correct, though there are also other limited options.

If your needs are reasonably simple, I'd look at WCF RIA Services first. If your service needs to provide more complex things, like callbacks to the client, RIA Services might not work for you, but the general WCF idea still holds.

You may also want to look at cross-compiling some of your business logic inside a Silverlight assembly, so you can get client-side rather than server-side validations, that sort of thing. But that's more gravy than an actual requirement for most LOB applications. The basic idea of using WCF in some fashion to wrap your existing infrastructure is the way to go.