Serving up Silverlight without IIS/webserver
In my previous post, I showed how to host WCF services. In the kiosk application that I am working on, I have, as previously mentioned, decided to not have IIS run locally on the machine. I have also decided host the Silverlight application locally. I do not want it to be fetched from the server for different reasons. So how can I serve up a Silverlight application without a webserver? Well…I am already hosting WCF services in a windows application…why not let the windows application serve up the Silverlight application as well?
WCF actually gives us this possibility very easily, and here is how it is done. I’m going to re-use the application from the previous post, so if you haven’t read it, I recommend doing so…
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Silverlight and non-IIS hosted WCF-services
I’m currently working on a kiosk application for a company called TicketDirect. They sell tickets to different events all around New Zealand and have decided to create a kiosk based solution where customers can buy tickets. The application needs to be Silverlight based for a couple of reasons, and must run Silverlight 3 as 4 doesn’t have a go-live license yet. The problem with this is that the application needs to talk to a credit/debit card unit as well as a ticket printer. The problem as you probably realize quickly, is that these units are connected to the computer physically and therefore are not available to Silverlight. And yeah…as you know, printing support is “limited” in Silverlight, so printing custom ticket layouts to a special ticket printer will not work…
This is how I solved it. I created a couple of WCF services to run locally on the machine and then had Silverlight connect to those to access the local system. The problem was that I did not want to run IIS on the local machines. Why? Well, for different reasons…such as the need for simple XCopy deployment. So the services would be hosted by a Windows application instead.
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WCF Services and EPiServer
I just spent some time trying to get my WCF Service to work on my EPiServer CMS 5 R2 installation. It was a lot more complicated than I thought it would be.
I had built this Silverlight application using a test application, launching it in the VS webserver and everything was working fine. It was a small Silverlight application that used a WCF service to get some data from the server. The epplication worked perfectly...until I decided to deploy it to my "real" site using IIS 7... The "real" site was an EPiServer application which caused some problems.
I deployedmy Silverlight app as well as my service to the site I was going to use. Deploying the application meant copying the xap file as well as the svc and assemmbly to the server. I also copied my service configuration to the web.config file. After this I opened my browser and browsed to localhost. And behold...a broken Silverlight application. The application started, but soon came to a screeching halt as it tried to connect to the service. Since the application actually loaded, I came to the conclusion that the IIS configuration for the Silverlight things were ok and that it was the service that was the problem.
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