DES Uploaded to CodePlex

Have uploaded the initial version of my hobby project Distributed Execution System to http://des.codeplex.com/

Check the homepage at http://des.codeplex.com/ for a brief summary of the project.

WCF Service and a SilverLight 2 beta 2 Application

While trying to call a simple WCF service from a silverlight application, not everything goes smoothly from within VS 2008. Though coding itself did not take more than half an hour, to hack the stuff to work good took me around a day.

You would usually require to get past the following hurdle's:

1.) The default binding for the WCF service appears to be secured - wsHttpBinding, which is not currently supported by silverlight. This mean editing the web.config to use basicHttpBinding instead.

2.) Even if the WCF service project and the silverlight application is in the same solution, you would not be able to call the WCF service directly since silverlight does not support cross-domain calls. This appears to be a security check from the silverlight end. To get past this, you would have to specify that both the project (WCF and the silverlight host web application) to use the same virtual directory from the project properties (check the 'Use IIS Web Server' under project properties, web tab). 

In my case, I used "http://localhost/NumberService" for the WCF service and "http://localhost/SilverLightApplication1Web" for the web application.

The above changes should get the silverlight to successfully call the WCF service from within the VS 2008 IDE. Incase you still get cross-domain errors say when your WCF service is on a different host, host the web applications directly under IIS and make sure you have created a 'clientaccesspolicy.xml' file in the root of the virtual directory with the following content :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>

<access-policy>

  <cross-domain-access>

    <policy>

      <allow-from http-request-headers="*">

        <domain uri="*"/>

      </allow-from>

      <grant-to>

        <resource path="/" include-subpaths="true"/>

      </grant-to>

    </policy>

  </cross-domain-access>

</access-policy>

The above bit just makes sure that cross domain access is allowed from all URLs (check out the allow-from tag). I could not get this to work while debugging from within the VS IDE though.

If you are still having trouble making cross domain calls, the easiest option is to create a proxy webservice within the same domain as the web application. This proxy webservice can make the actual call to the webservice on a different domain.

3.) When trying to host the silverlight web application under IIS, you might get an IIS error about unknown MIME type 'xap'. In this case, just create a new entry under the MIME types within IIS for 'xap' as 'application/x-silverlight-2-b2'

4.) Strangely, once you have setup the above two projects, VS 2008 fails to load later when you try to reload the solution. It fails with a System.Runtime.InteropServices.COMException each time. The only way to get past this while making sure that the solution loads good is to load VS 2008 under the administrator credentials. From Vista, right click on the VS 2008 shortcut and click on 'Run As Administrator'

Further Silverlight Notes:

1.) Starting Silverlight 2 beta 2, It is quite easy to get a simple timer to work under Silverlight 2 beta 2. Just use the System.Windows.Threading.DispatcherTimer class.

2.) All calls to the WCF service is by default async. The service reference within the silverlight application always generates an async reference (the one with the 'Async' suffic to the method)