Troubleshooting Silverlight Data Access
One of the most common questions on the forums has to do with web services and getting them to execute properly. I have done a couple of posts on this, now Tim Heuer has put together a webcast on this topic that covers some great troubleshooting tips and a couple of things I wasn't aware of before I watched it.
You can see the webcast here:
http://msevents.microsoft.com/CUI/WebCastEventDetails.aspx?EventID=1032386657&EventCategory=5&culture=en-US&CountryCode=US
One of the key tips was similar to my earlier post about using Fiddler to see your web traffic and easily see any errors. The problem with Fiddler is that it doesn't automatically display traffic to localhost, you can make it do that but you need to jump through some major hoops. This is important for Silverlight troubleshooting since one of the most common problems is that when you move a Silverlight app to your web server, it's still trying to hit localhost.
A better option, as Tim points out, is Nikhil Kothari's Web Development Helper:
http://projects.nikhilk.net/WebDevHelper/
It's an IE plugin and is able to track traffic to localhost without any extra configuration, it sits at the bottom of IE and shows you all of your web requests, including web service calls:
For those of you who are not familiar with Nikhil, he's the brains behind Script#, an amazing project which lets you write C# code and compile it to javascript, he was a major player on ASP.NET AJAX, and also created the Web Matrix tool. Lately he's been blogging about some Silverlight topics, I highly recommend checking out his blog:
http://www.nikhilk.net/