C H A P T E R  23

Networking

Like most software, Silverlight applications need to interact with the outside world to get relevant, current information. You've already seen one tremendously useful way to pull information into a Silverlight application: using WCF services, which allow Silverlight applications to retrieve data from the web server by calling a carefully encapsulated piece of .NET code. However, WCF services won't provide all the data you need to use. In many situations you'll want to retrieve information from other non-.NET repositories, such as representational state transfer (REST) web services, RSS feeds, and ordinary HTML web pages.

In this chapter, you'll learn about this other side of the Silverlight networking picture. You'll pick up the techniques you need to download data from a variety of different non-.NET sources and convert it to the form you need. On the way, you'll also learn how to process XML data with the remarkable XDocument class and LINQ to XML. But the most ambitious task you'll consider in this chapter is using Silverlight's socket support to build a basic messaging application.