CODEWITHSUNDEEP
.netwcfsilverlightinteropmessaging
Yes - that Jake.
Yes - that Jake.

Reputation: 17121

Is there any way, short of "copy and paste inheritence" to share a .net class with a Silverlight app?

I have a project in two parts: a Silverlight front end and a WCF duplex service. Ideally, I would like to pass a message of a custom type (call it TradeOffer) from the WCF service to be consumed by the Silverlight application.

When I try to, I get an error that indicates I can't pass an object of an unknown type across the wire like that and that, maybe, I could do so if I used the InternalsVisibleTo attribute on the server component.

I'm not sure if that would work in this environment and know it would be messy in development. I originally put the message definition in a library to be used by both the service and the client, but couldn't add a reference to the library from the Silverlight client (because it's not a Silverlight assembly.)

Is there some way I can access the definition of a message class from both the Silverlight client that consumes it and the service that publishes it without using the InternalsVisibleTo attribute or should I write the application another way?

Upvotes: 2

Views: 112

Answers (4)

Ruben Bartelink
Ruben Bartelink

Reputation: 61795

The rest of the posts were naturally correct, but jsut thought I'd throw in an update:-

Upvotes: 0

DaveB
DaveB

Reputation: 9530

In Reusing .NET Assemblies in Silverlight the author describes several techniques that may be helpful. I have used the file level sharing and found it to work very well. (http://www.netfxharmonics.com/2008/12/Reusing-NET-Assemblies-in-Silverlight)

A similar article is Sharing Entities between WCF and Silverlight. (http://10rem.net/blog/2009/07/13/sharing-entities-between-wcf-and-silverlight)

Upvotes: 2

Ken Smith
Ken Smith

Reputation: 20445

The standard way of doing what you describe is to build your WCF service references using the Add Service Reference dialog box. What happens then is that Visual Studio builds a proxy for you that includes a series of Silverlight classes that have the same fields and properties as your .NET class. This doesn't transfer any of the business logic, of course, but you shouldn't be using a class like that for over-the-wire data transfer anyway. (In other words, data transfer objects should be as dumb as possible.)

You can also use RIA services as a more dynamic alternative to the "Add Service Reference" dialog box, but my understanding is that RIA services don't work well at this point with duplex services.

In the Silverlight 4 world, it's possible to do a limited amount of assembly sharing, if you start by compiling the assembly in Silverlight: http://blogs.msdn.com/clrteam/archive/2009/12/01/sharing-silverlight-assemblies-with-net-apps.aspx

Upvotes: 1

DancesWithBamboo
DancesWithBamboo

Reputation: 4156

Build 2 different VS projects/assemblies. One for Silverlight and one for the Server. Use the same physical class file in both projects. If you have Silverlight or Server specific functionality in the component; you can use compiler directives to sort them out.

Upvotes: 1

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