Question

I have a MVC pattern in place where I have been developing WinForms and WebForms against. Now, I would like to move onto Silverlight and thus need to ‘web services’-enable my Model layer.

Where do I start? I can’t seem to find any good resources. Many talk about EF or ADO.NET Data Services. What do I need to do to my Model layer to enable it for WCF REST?

Answer 1

There are many approaches you can take to build your server-side

• ADO.NET Data Services – here is some documentation
• ASP.NET MVC – if you do decide to use ASP.NET MVC, then this tutorial shows you how to access the service from Silverlight. Essentially Tim is showing you how to access the particular REST service exposed by ASP.NET MVC, but the same techniques (WebClient, etc) can be used to talk to any REST service
• Build your own WCF SOAP-based service which implements the MVC pattern. This link shows you how to build and access WCF SOAP-based services in Silverlight.
• Build your own REST service which implements a MVC pattern. There is a universal way to comsume any REST service from Silverlight, which is described here. To build the rest service you can use whatever platform you choose. You may consider the WCF REST support that comes out-of-the-box in .Net 3.5, or the WCF REST Starter Kit, which builds on the out-of-the-box REST support in WCF to give you some extra features. Or you can consider any other REST service framework of your choosing.