Silverlight 3 Beta and Binary message encoding

Silverlight 3 Beta uses Binary message encoding as a default WCF binding option, this is also the methodology used in the “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service” item template of Visual Studio.

John Papa has posted a nice article explaining the advantages of this binding instead of the “usual” BasicHttpBinding used in Silverlight 2 (other details available here and here), what about the client side? How can I use this new Binding?

These are the steps required for explicitely specifying the new binding in the code:

  • add a “Service Reference” from Visual Studio;
  • initialize and call the service in this way

EndpointAddress address = new EndpointAddress("<Your Service Uri Here>");

CustomBinding binding = new CustomBinding(
new BinaryMessageEncodingBindingElement(),
new HttpTransportBindingElement());

YourServiceRef.ServiceClient svc = new YourServiceRef.ServiceClient(binding, address);

Download the Visual Studio 2008 solution (also tested on Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1:)

Tags: , ,

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 27th, 2009 at 18:32and is filed under .NET Programming, Rich Internet Applications, Service Oriented Architecture, REST, Web 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

Leave a Reply