HemiGames.com – Developer Blog

I wanted to build on the earlier Silverlight experiment by adding some sort of functionality, and this is the result. It’s a proof-of-concept file uploading utility that shows how Silverlight can interact with remote servcies and dbs, and of course share files. The actual file upload is performed using Michiel Post’s excellent Multi File Uploader.

You can use this sample to create a user account, then create some virtual folders on the remote server, and then upload files to your folders. If you upload a picture file the web service will also create a thumbnail on the server.

(DISCLAIMER – This sample is intended as a proof-of-concept only and may have some bugs.)

This is as far as I’m planning to go with Silverlight for now. For any RIA development in the near-future I plan to use Flash instead.

I’ve been playing around with Silverlight recently and thought this would be an interesting exercise. The widget below demonstrates how Silverlight can be used in conjunction with a web service and SQL Server DB to create extremely powerful web apps. (Note that the Silverlight plugin is required to see the widget).

See if you can create a new account and log in…

So what’s going on behind the scenes? Well there are 3 seperate elements to the program:

In this case we have an SQL Server db on our server that holds the login details, and a .net web service on the same server that has the relevant priveleges set up to read & write to the db. The web service also has a public interface defined in a .asmx file, which we then reference in the Silverlight client itself. By adding the reference we can then access the web service’s methods and classes. At runtime our function calls are communicated to and from the service using SOAP, and the relevant class data is serialised and sent for us transparently by .net.

What this gives us is a highly portable, OS independent, platform for deploying extremely interactive applications (or games). The biggest hurdle to reaching the users at the moment is still the number of people who haven’t installed the Silverlight plugin (Flash still has the upper hand in that respect), but this could still make an excellent platform for games on the web.