Class Libraries, Silverlight and Webservices

Question

I have a Silverlight Class Library that I want to use in both my Silverlight and my WebService project.

I am able to create and reference the Library in both projects without any problems, but when I try to use any of the classes in the Library on the Silerlight project, I get an ambiguous reference error between my Library and the Asmx Webservice (apparently, the silverlight project believes that the classes in the class library exist in the webservice).

How can I correct this issue? I have tried rebuilding and cleaning, but it does not seem to work. Can anyone help?

Answer 1

Sounds like the objects you are passing to Silverlight, via the WCF service, are the same objects in your class library. In that case the generated web-reference objects will be given the same names. Linking with the library will then give you 2 sets of objects with the same names.

If you install RIA services, once feature is the ability to share code between client and server by simply adding ".shared" in the class filenames before the extensions. ASMX services are so last century :)

if you don't want to learn the RIA services way of sharing objects across the great-web-divide (which I would recommend), you need to separate the data objects from the functionality you actually want to share client and server side.

To give more specific advice on your current set-up I would need to see more about how it is structured.

Answer 2

A technique you can use is aliasing your using statements:

using MyNameSpace = My.Name.Space;
using MyWebService = My.Web.Service;

Then access all of your objects with these aliases to remove the ambiguities.