Question

I am coming from a WPF / Windows application background and am learning Silverlight/Web.
The first thing that really confuses me are the tiers. In Windows applications, you have a clear separation between clients – that need to be deployed on each users machine – that in turn talk to the Windows Service/Web service. The latter then in turn talks to the database to retrieve the requested data.

In Silverlight everything seems to be easier. There are no clients to be deployed, the users just open a browser and enter the url address and finished. At the hosting point where my silverlight app lives too, I could just talk directly to the service assembly locally without having to put it separately on a different web service, correct? Or am I missing a point here?

Many Thanks for advice,
Kave

Answer 1

In Silverlight, the Silverlight application is the client. Generally speaking, the Silverlight application communicates with the server from whence it was downloaded. So the web server hosts components for allowing communications with clients, and it hosts the client binaries themselves.

Reading between the lines, I think what you might be missing is the fact that the Silverlight application is downloaded to the client machine and run there. In order for it to communicate back to the server, it needs some means of doing so (RIA services, for example).