For things that aren’t a part of the Visual Studio tools (yet) and things that help me move faster in my development, I like to take advantage of the power of Visual Studio’s templates and snippets capabilities.  I’ve created a few and modified a few of others that I use regularly.  I’ve shown them in a few presentations and thought I’d package them up in a single bundle for your convenience if you choose to use them.  I was going to package Robby’s snippets up as well, but didn’t think he’d appreciate that…you should get his Silverlight snippets as well...

I’ve been getting a few notes on issues relating to people trying Silverlight beta 2 and WCF or other services.  The most common issue I’m seeing reported is “my exception is showing a 404-not found error message, but the service is there and works!” Okay, there could be several things happening here, but let’s tackle the “make sure it is plugged in” type situations.  I don’t mean to make light of the error, because at first I, too, was banging my head against a wall.  Sometimes it helps to have a second set of eyes or a deeper understanding...

So you want to read an RSS/Atom feed on the interwebs and saw the SyndicationFeed class you could use in Silverlight to give a nice RIA display of the syndicated data.  Great, no problem right, just wire up an WebClient, point it to the RSS feed on something like http://silverlight.net or something and boom, done.  Wait, what’s this 404 Not Found error?  In most cases this is going to be a result of a cross-domain issue.  If you haven’t started working with services yet, Silverlight requires a cross-domain policy file to be in place to access remote data not on...

In my previous post about cross-domain policy files I received some comments about whether or not cross-domain access is allowed on Silverlight Streaming.  I think really this is two questions that I'll try to clarify here. What is Silverlight Streaming? For those who don't know, Microsoft provides anyone with an account to "stream" Silverlight applications for free.  We'll give you 10GB of space to put your Silverlight applications.  There are some limitations, which you can read about in the service.  The "streaming" name has confused some.  It isn't only a "where can I put media files" location, but is a service to...

If you are starting to get into integrating web services with Silverlight, you'll notice that you have to have a cross domain policy file in place on the target server, that is to say, the server hosting the service you want to implement.  There are some public web services (Flickr, YouTube, Digg, etc.) that already have these files in place for Flash, but implement in a slightly different way. When calling a cross-domain service, Silverlight will check for the existence of clientaccesspolicy.xml first.  This is the format defined by Silverlight and provides a pretty flexible way to define who can access...

In a previous post, I wrote about some samples of calling various types of services from Silverlight 2.  In the code, I was using constructors in my ASMX and WCF services with specifying a binding type and endpoint address. It was called out to me that in other demonstrations, people did not use this construct.  While the method I demonstrated works (explicitly specifying the binding and endpoint), in some cases it may not be necessary.  One such case would be if you only have one endpoint and it is basicHttpBinding. The error in my code/instructions was about changing the binding information in...

UPDATE: Source code posted here. Now that Silverlight 2 is out to the masses (even in beta form), there are likely a lot of developers looking to wire-up web services with their applications in .NET rather than the Silverlight 1.0 method of Javascript.  I thought I'd give you some quick examples of how to do this using some different methods: ASP.NET Web Services (ASMX), Windows Communication Foundation (WCF), REST service, and talk about cross-domain calls.  These are meant to be examples using very much 'hello world' style services, but demonstrating at least how to execute the call. If you are an ASP.NET...