David Sackstein's Blog

Silverlight Client With Sockets - Barebones Sample by David Sackstein

Dan Wahlin wrote an excellent article on Silverlight Client with Sockets - accompanied by a sample application. My objective in this post is simply to reduce Dan’s application to the bare minimum so that it is easier to reuse. You can download my reduced sample here . Changes These are the differences between my sample and Dan’s. There are now only three projects: The Silverlight control, the hosting Web site and the server. I reduced the Silverlight client to contain a single text box displaying...

Cross-Domain Policy Files for Flash and Silverlight with WCF by David Sackstein

Introduction In an earlier blog I described my motivation for upgrading an ASMX Web Service to WCF in a particular project . In that project the client was a Flash client hosted in a web page. The upgrade was simple and, as long as I ran the client from within Flex Builder , it had no problem consuming the new self-hosted WCF service instead of the ASMX. Allowing Cross-Domain Access However, once I deployed the package outside the Flex Builder, all calls to the service failed. The reason was that...

Enabling RESTful Services with WCF by David Sackstein

I came across a number of sources that describe how to support RESTful Services with WCF, but unfortunately, I couldnt find one source that had all the small print. So, here it is – all in one place. Objective Let’s say you have a WCF Web Service exposed at an endpoint with this address: www.mycompany.com/Services/ProductsService.svc . And let’s say that in addition to speaking sophisticated SOAP with some clients you would also like to respond to GET requests from simple clients that need to retrieve...

Case Study: Upgrading from ASMX to WCF by David Sackstein

Introduction In this post I will share my considerations for upgrading an ASMX Web Service to WCF in an existing product. Following the upgrade I encountered a little hitch with Flash and cross domain policies . In this later post I demonstrate how overcome the hitch with WCF . Motivation for the Upgrade When I started working on the project , the architecture had been set and a first version of the product had already been released. A Flash client interacted with an ASMX Web Service hosted by ASP...

Flash and Silverlight by David Sackstein

I mentioned some time back that I am doing some development work with Flash. It has given me a great opportunity to get a broader perspective on what Microsoft has accomplished with Silverlight (and WCF) and I would like to share some of the insights gained in my next few posts. Naturally I will be making some comparisons between the technologies, but I will begin with a humble disclaimer. I am not an expert on Flash and my experience with this one project is limited. If I do either technology an...