Silverlight 3 from WinForm to RIA

The last weeks I was quite busy trying to move an existing WinForm application to Silverlight.

I would like to show you all the problems I had to solve, from the beginning to the end.

Today, I would like to explain the architecture to you, as this was one of the first problems on the long list.

The existing application talks to a TCP/IP server, listening on a special port. As Silverlight is not capable of talking to neither SQLServer nor a TCP/IP port directly I had to split the application to the Client part (Silverlight) and a WCF service, which talks to the TCP/IP server.

This means for all companies (which would like to use the web client) that they will need IIS, right?

Wrong, as I was using a WCF service the TCP/IP server can easily learn to respond to WCF requests, which I will show you in my next post.