Applies to Silverlight 3, 4 and 5

When working on a Silverlight project that involves services, WCF is the preferred choice for building a service if we have to create both the service and the Silverlight client application that will use it. Using WCF gives us complete control over what types will be sent to the client and for each type. We can also specify whether or not a field should be included in the client-side copy of the type.

When we want to build a Silverlight application that works with the data available on the service (perhaps coming from a database or another external service), we need to ask ourselves two questions. How should we design the service that exposes the data so that it can be accessible from Silverlight? Secondly, how should we go about designing the Silverlight application so that it communicates with the service?