Silverlight and Web Service Madness

<rant>

Here are the palette of options available to the Silverlight developer for client/server communication when I add “New Item” to my VS2008 project:

• ADO.net Data Service
• Authentication Domain Service
• Domain Service
• Silverlight Enabled WCF Service
• Web Service

As a rule, I find that they all work in very limited profile combination. For instance, none of the WCF services supply the correct OperationContext.Authentication unless you try using wsDualHttpBinding, which Silverlight 3 doesn’t support. The documentation is pretty bad, and most examples require Visual Studio 2010. Can I remind you that VS2010 is not available to people outside MS at the moment?

Can someone point to any guidance on what works with what, and which of these projects MS intends to support in the long run.

Because, MS certainly can’t support them all. They couldn’t even support one properly.

</rant>

Update 8 Apr 2010 – I just came across this ( a list of known issues with Silverlight 4 and WCF). Complexity has it’s costs, and I suspect that, even for a behemoth like Microsoft, their test department is not able cover all the possible scenarios.  What we need to now is some guidance what profile is going to work out-of-the-box.