Pro Business Applications with Silverlight 5

Communicating Asynchronously

The first thing you need to be aware of when attempting any server communication in Silverlight is that it must be performed asynchronously. The Silverlight team made the decision to not support synchronous communication in order to avoid service/HTTP/socket calls blocking the Silverlight application's user interface (and in turn, the browser, as Silverlight runs in the browser's user interface thread) while waiting for a response. Regularly hanging the browser would not make Silverlight a good plug-in citizen. Therefore, you will need to become accustomed to asynchronous programming. This typically involves making a call to the server, and waiting for an event to be raised indicating that the call is complete. The ...