My company currently uses a Silverlight 3 front-end to allow users to view data that comes from our Windows Services. The Silverlight 3 Interface and the Services communicate via IPC, but this is problematic as Silverlight 3 only supports IPC connections via HTTP instead of TCP.
We are planning to move from Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4, but our company has been bitten by bumpy upgrades in the past.
The question is: What are some of the drawbacks or issues you have ran into when transitioning from Silverlight 3 to Silverlight 4?
Examples of things I’m looking for are:
- Heavily used data structures that were dropped in Silverlight 4
- Fundamental changes in how Silverlight deals with IPC, threading, or other such features
- Backwards compatibility issues
- Etc.
Silverlight 4 has some valuable fixes and features in it. And I haven’t found any backwards compatibility issues with it personally.
However, Tim Heuer covers a couple scenarios here when upgrading from 3 to 4…
http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2010/04/15/silverlight-4-breaking-changes-backward-compatibility.aspx
And there’s a full document from Microsoft titled, “Ensuring That Your Silverlight Applications Work with Silverlight 4“.