This was the first time I gave this talk but the attendees seemed to be very receptive. The concerns about security in Silverlight, especially related to the protection of Intellectual Property (IP) and account access are really on peoples' minds. Based on the thoughtful question I received here and in Roanoke 2 weeks ago, I have decided to dedicate a whole chapter in my new book to Silverlight security principles.

In this talk, I discussed the various methods by which a Silverlight application can access remote web services. We didn't have time to get into RSS/Atom syndication but I'll be sure to cover it in a future talk. We also discussed cross-domain policy, another hot security topic, as it turns out. I showed how to enabled a WCF web service for RESTful delivery and then showed how to consume SOAP-based services from Silverlight. We closed by looking at the use of an in-domain, SOAP-based WCF service to act as a proxy for a cross-domain RESTful service that does not allow cross-domain access by policy. Here are the slides and sample code:

WCFRESTDEMO20080517.zip (18.89 kb) - sample code that shows how to make a WCF service RESTful; a Silverlight control is included that demonstrates how to use it; there is also a Digg.com downloader that demonstrates cross-domain functionality from Silverlight.

Twitter20080517.zip (25.59 kb) - sample code that shows how to consume an in-domain SOAP-based service from Silverlight; that SOAP-based service is really a proxy to a RESTful service at Twitter.com. And since Twitter.com's cross-domain policy doesn't allow access from my domain, this example shows how the server-side WebClient class can be used to circumvent the policy limitation.

Silverlight and WCF - NOVA Code Camp 2008.1.pptx (199.39 kb) - my PowerPoint slides from this discussion.

Accessing web services with SOAP can be just as easy as using REST with all the enterprise-class features you've come to expect from WSDL and SOAP. Who says that the cycle of metadata and proxy generation should be so hard? I gave a talk at the NOVA Code Camp 2008.1 that shows how by using the CodeDOM, and the ServiceModel.MetadataImporter, you can generate proxy code dynamically.

In this talk, I also showed how IronPython can be used to add a dynamic "lower edge" to a C# application to make it much more dynamic feeling. Finally, we finished with a discussion about features that may be added to Visual Studio 10 and the C# 4.0 language sprecification to make SOA achievable for many more developers. It was a lively discussion with lots of great questions. Here are the slides and the demo code:

ProxyGen20080517.zip (20.86 kb) - Sample code that demonstrates the use of IronPython and some custom CodeDOM code to avoid generating proxies for WCF integration via SOAP/WSDL. IronPython 2.0 Beta 1 or newer is required to compile this code.

Simple SOA with SuperSOAP by Kevin Hazzard.pptx (208.46 kb) - my PowerPoint slides from this discussion.