Web Service

Accessing Web Services in Silverlight


Silverlight version 2 client applications run in the browser and often need to access data from a variety of external sources. A typical example involves accessing data from a database on a backend server and displaying it in a Silverlight user interface. Another common scenario is to update data on a backend service through a Silverlight user interface that posts to that service. These external data sources often take the form of Web services. The services can be SOAP services created using the Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) or some other SOAP-based technology, or they can be just plain HTTP or REST services. Silverlight clients can access these Web services directly or by using a proxy generated from metadata published by the service. Silverlight provides the necessary functionality to work with a variety of data formats used by services. These formats include XML, JSON, RSS, and Atom. These data formats are accessed using Serialization components, Linq to XML, Linq to JSON, and Syndication components. Web services that a Silverlight application can access must conform to certain rules to allow such access. These rules are discussed in context within the topics contained in this section.