Silverlight 1.1 – Look before you leap (into LINQ or into WCF)

I spent a lot of time coding in javascript for silverlight 1.0 and am having fun now getting back to managed code with 1.1. I’m even doing it all in C#, but the main reason is because I  have a lot of nearly reusable javascript code and it’s just easier to port that to C#.

However, as usual, I am just diving head first and not doing too much advance research. Two things I learned the hard way:

Silverlight does not yet support LINQ
I spent bunch of time buliding a beatiful LINQ to XML method to build up some XAML by hand. But it was my first time using LINQ to XML to build and XML document, so what I learned in doing that was not a waste by any means.

Silverlight does not yet support WCF
I built a very nice WCF service, with composite types and everything only to learn (when I went to add service reference to my SL client) that it’s not supported yet. There are a few workarounds, [here on the sliverlight forums] and [here in Luis Abreu’s blog], but since this particular code will be for a conference demo and I don’t want to add any extra layers of complexity, I will just go back to ASMX for this one.

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