Introducing Silverlight 4

Chapter 5. Network Communication

So far, you've learned aboutXAML, Silverlight user controls, how to create user interfaces in Silverlight, and media integration capabilities of Silverlight. The next major pieces of Silverlight relate to communicating with other systems and working with data (which we'll delve into in the next chapter). The three main communication mechanisms Silverlight provides are services via Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), direct HTTP communication via the HttpWebRequest and WebClient classes, and raw communication using sockets. Silverlight 3 introduced some significant changes to WCF, including improved security and a binary binding. Two other interesting aspects related to networking were also introduced in Silverlight ...