Building and Accessing Services Using Proxies

Microsoft Silverlight will reach end of support after October 2021. Learn more.

Topics in this section describe the main tasks and considerations in building, configuring, and debugging Silverlight applications and the Silverlight-enabled Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), ASP.NET AJAX, and SOAP services that those Silverlight applications can access.

Client proxies are client applications that a client uses to communicate with a service. Client proxies are said to be generated when they are created automatically with a tool that uses machine-readable metadata. Some Web services use metadata to describe their functionality in a way that enables the automation of client generation. This metadata describes the operation of the service and the data types it uses in the form of a contract, and hence contains the information needed to build a proxy that can communicate with the service. Silverlight version 4 can use the Add Service Reference tool in Visual Studio 2010 to generate proxies that can access SOAP and ASP.NET AJAX services. The Silverlight Metadata Utility Tool (SLsvcUtil.exe) can also be used to generate a Silverlight client if you prefer working outside Visual Studio. This section focuses on using this functionality in Silverlight application development.

For information about how to access HTTP-based services from Silverlight applications that do not use generated proxies, see Accessing HTTP and REST-Based Services Directly.

In This Section

  • Configuring Web Service Usage in Silverlight Clients
    Describes the support provided in Silverlight 4 for Web client configuration that enables deployment-time modifications, such as changing various settings like the address of the targeted service endpoints without having to rebuild and redeploy the binaries.
  • Accessing SOAP Services
    Describes the set of supported protocols when accessing SOAP services from Silverlight version 4 and various restrictions associated with HTTP, .NET Framework-specific contracts, and temporary restrictions associated with the current version of Silverlight.
  • Accessing ASP.NET AJAX Services
    Describes considerations when accessing Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) AJAX services, ASP.NET AJAX services, and some built-in services, such as the profile application service, the roles service, and the authentication service provided by ASP.NET.
  • Debugging Services for Silverlight Applications
    Provides guidance that assists in the debugging of Silverlight applications in the form of a checklist that describes what to do when encountering some of the most common problems in Silverlight application development.
  • Creating and Handling Faults in Silverlight
    Describes the support provided in Silverlight 4 for the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) SOAP fault programming model, which enables the service to communicate error conditions to the client.

Reference

See Also

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