Services (and most notably web services) are a main ingredient in today's LOB applications. Nowadays, you'll have a hard time finding an application that doesn't require access to data. While Silverlight doesn't offer a native client-side database solution (though you can find some great third-party solutions for that, such as Sterling DB), web services are your main route to access data.

Microsoft made sure that Silverlight is well equipped for the task of accessing data. Silverlight is able to consume services of ASMX, WCF, REST, POX, RSS, and others. Just like any other .NET language, Visual Studio will automatically generate a proxy class in our project when working with an ASMX or WCF service. This proxy class is in charge of making the actual connection to the service, and send and receive data to and from it. The one big difference between Silverlight and other .NET languages is that all communication in Silverlight happens asynchronously. This is...