ZeroC Labs: Ice for Silverlight
Ice for Silverlight is a run-time module that enables clients targeted at Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0 platform to seamlessly communicate with Ice servers via an efficient on-the-wire protocol.

With Ice for Silverlight, you can create applications that provide rich Web content by using ZeroC's proven and elegant APIs to access remote servers directly from the browser.

Overview

Ice for Silverlight enables clients that target Microsoft's Silverlight 2.0 platform to communicate with Ice servers directly from the client's web browser. A simple run-time module running inside the browser contains a lightweight version of the Ice run time and sends requests via HTTP to a bridge that runs in the web server. The bridge forwards the client's requests to the target Ice server(s) and returns results back to the client via HTTP.

Using Ice for Silverlight, you can combine the presentation capabilities of Silverlight with the distributed computing features of Ice to create true web applications.

Feature Highlights

  • No need for client-side software installation or configuration. All run-time support is downloaded to the client on demand.
  • Support for the complete Slice type system.
  • Efficient request forwarding without any unmarshaling and remarshaling of request data.
  • Client code uses the normal Ice for .NET API, making it easy to re-use existing client logic for Silverlight.
  • Elegant support for asynchronous invocation via C# delegates.
  • No part of Ice for Silverlight requires application-specific knowledge, so there is no need to configure the bridge with Slice type information.
Copyright © 2008 ZeroC, Inc.