Pro Silverlight 5 in VB

Sockets

So far, you've focused exclusively on retrieving information over HTTP. Even though HTTP was developed for downloading simple HTML documents in the earliest days of the Internet, it also works surprisingly well as a transport mechanism for XML documents and the request and response messages used to interact with web services.

That said, HTTP isn't without a few significant drawbacks. First, HTTP is a high-level standard that's built on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). It will never be as fast as a raw network connection. Second, HTTP uses a request model that forces the client to ask for data. There's no way for the server to call back to the client if new information arrives. This limitation means that HTTP is a poor choice for everything ...