Silverlight Business Applications Across Networks – Thoughts
Bruce posts on the ISV Developer Community blog about the January 2009 MSDN Magazine article “Build Line-Of-Business Enterprise Apps With Silverlight”. The article is definately worth a read. I’m unfortunately left with the question of why from Hanu’s perspective I have to do Push notifications using “Silverlight only allows the connections to the server ports in the range of 4502 to 4532″ and “runtime will make a connection to an IP endpoint on the same IP address with the port number 943. This port number is hardwired to the Silverlight implementation and can’t be configured by applications or changed by the application developer”. If I deploy my Silverlight Push RIA to thousands of client all running within different corporations that have strict firewall security (which by default allow port 80/443 access), will I have to submit n pieces of paperwork to n corporations to get the 45xx port open to my external server for push to work?
Yes. The alternative is to use the slower WCF Polling Duplex support which works over HTTP port 80:
http://petermcg.wordpress.com/silverlight-polling-duplex-part-1-architecture/
As Hanu mentions, this “may not be the optimal choice”