Silverlight 1.1 Alpha and WCF - A Bit Lacking
(
Feb 06 2008 - 01:49:51 PM by
Timothy Khouri) - [
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I've gotta say that while I am impressed with Silverlight, and I'm very excited about Silverlight 2.0 coming out soon... what I see so far in the Silverlight 1.1 Alpha refresh is missing the BIGGEST thing ever when it comes to the .Net framework... and that's WCF!
With WCF you can create beautiful two-way (DuplexClientBase) remoted objects, and communicate with a server as if you were making native calls. What's the big deal you might ask? Well, when you keep in mind the fact that Silverlight will be coming with an extremely trimmed down version of the .Net framework, you are going to be missing a lot of functionality that you may need to tap into. So, if you could make a call to a server component (via WCF), then you could tap into the full framework there, and send the results back to your client.
Not a Perfect Solution
I do realize that making remoted calls to a service on your server doesn't really open up the Framework completely (as much of the framework wouldn't make sense unless it was local to your application domain), but the possibilities would be huge.
Silverlight vs Java Applets
Java Applets can open up a "Socket" connection and connect to a server component using a TCP protocol, whereas Silverlight cannot (at the moment of me writing this rant/post). That's why there are some MMORP games out there that are built inside of a Java applet. The heavy processing of the code is done on the server, and simple bits of data are streamed back.
If Silverlight could utilize WCF, then the world of the internet as we know it would change, guaranteed.