In this chapter, we have learned how to create a simple WCF web service and how to consume it from a Silverlight client. You can explore all the power of WCF, but keep in mind that the Silverlight WCF client can set some limitations to this power, as sometimes only some bindings and channels are supported. Anyway, it is being improved in every new version.
We have seen how easily Visual Studio generates all proxy classes (Client classes) in Silverlight from the WDSL definition of a web service. We have also learned how to consume an existing web service without WSDL facilities, passing parameters on URL and receiving and parsing the JSON response, close to REST principles. You can also apply this model with your own web services when it doesn't fit the WCF standard, that is, not publishing a WSDL guide to the service. For instance, those services created as actions in ASP.NET MVC, or those implemented using other platforms such as PHP, Java, and so on.
Finally, we have implemented...