Designing Service Interfaces For Silverlight Clients

When designing a service interfaces based on WCF you might be considering indicating service errors via service faults. By and large that might be a good choice but in the case of Silverlight clients consuming that service you may want to read Eugene's blog first. Eugene describes very detailed the technical background for why a Silverlight client running in a web browser may not be able to see the fault with all details. He also provide a few suggestions for how to get around that limitation - which is not Silverlight's fault! - including code examples. In some cases have a separate set of services for Silverlight client's might be an option worth exploring as well. That way you can give service clients, which are not hampered by browser's 'filtering', the best possible experience.

Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'Global'

If you get an error as follows: "Parser Error Message: Could not load type 'Global'" then you may be able to fix this issue by doing the following:

1. Open the file containing your class Global typically located in the file Global.asax.cs,
2. Note the namespace for that file
3. Open the file Global.asax
4. Locate the line that contains the element "... Application Codebehind=..."
5. In that line ensure that the element "Inherits=..." includes the namespace for your Global class, e.g. MyWebSite.Global, (Inherits="MyWebSite.Global"). Replace MyWebSite with the namespace noted in step 2
6. Recompile and redeploys.
7. The error should be gone.

Note that this post applies to VS2008 and ASP.NET using .NET 3.5. The web site in question hosted web services only. This post may not work for other scenarios or for other root causes.