Ice for .NET includes support for Silverlight and the .NET Compact Framework (.NET CF).
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Using Ice for Silverlight and .NET CF
These versions of Ice differ from Ice for .NET in several ways, therefore you must re-compile Ice to target Silverlight or .NET CF. The Ice installer for Windows includes the Silverlight and .NET CF versions of the Ice run time in install-dir\bin\sl\Ice.dll and install-dir\bin\cf\Ice.dll, respectively. The Ice Visual Studio Add-in automatically selects the appropriate DLL for your project. To build Ice for .NET CF in a source distribution, enable COMPACT in cs\config\Make.rules.mak.cs; to build Ice for Silverlight, enable SILVERLIGHT in the same file.
Limitations of Ice for Silverlight and .NET CF
This table lists the Ice for .NET features that may not be available when using Silverlight or .NET CF:
| Feature | Silverlight | .NET CF |
|---|---|---|
| Protocol compression | No | No |
| Serializable objects | No | No |
| IceSSL transport plug-in | No | No |
ICE_CONFIG environment variable | No | No |
Ice.Application class | No | Yes (without signal support) |
Glacier2.Application class | No | Yes |
| Thread priorities | No | Yes |
| Server-side support | No | Yes |
| Bi-directional callbacks | Yes | Yes |
| Loading properties from Windows registry | No | Yes |
Ice.StdOut and Ice.StdErr properties | No | Yes |
Ice.PrintProcessId property | No | Yes |
Ice.LogFile property | No | Yes |
Ice.TCP.SndSize and Ice.TCP.RcvSize properties | Yes | No |
| Multi-homed DNS addresses | No | Yes |
| Dynamic loading of class and exception factories | No | No |
With respect to multi-homed DNS addresses, the Silverlight API never returns more than one IP address when performing a DNS lookup, even for a multi-homed host name that is associated with multiple IP addresses. As a result, the Ice for Silverlight run time cannot attempt to transparently establish a connection to all of the IP addresses associated with a multi-homed host name.
Managing Factory Assemblies
When receiving a Slice user exception or a concrete Slice object-by-value, the Ice run time must be able to dynamically translate the encoded Slice type ID (such as ::MyModule::MyType) into a .NET class name (such as MyModule.MyType), dynamically locate that class, and instantiate it. This is convenient for .NET applications because it requires no additional user configuration; at startup, the Ice for .NET run time recursively loads all dependent assemblies used by the program to ensure that any generated classes are available if necessary.
Neither Silverlight nor the Compact Framework allow a program to discover its dependent assemblies, so this strategy cannot work. Consequently, Ice adds the new configuration property Ice.FactoryAssemblies so that you can explicitly list any assemblies that contain the generated code for user exceptions or concrete classes. When searching for a class, Ice first checks in the assemblies specified by this property. If the type is not found, Ice automatically looks in the standard Ice assemblies (Ice, Glacier2, IceBox, IceGrid, IcePatch2, and IceStorm).
Note that the program itself is also considered an assembly. If you compiled the main program directly with Slice-generated code, your Ice.FactoryAssemblies property must include the program itself if the generated code includes user exceptions or concrete classes. For simple build scenarios in which all generated code is compiled directly into the executable, the following configuration setting is sufficient:
Ice.FactoryAssemblies=client
This example assumes the executable is named client.exe. On the other hand, if Slice-generated code is also compiled into a dependent assembly, your configuration might look like this instead:
Ice.FactoryAssemblies=client MyOtherAssembly
Failing to define Ice.FactoryAssemblies can cause the Ice run time in the receiver to raise NoObjectFactoryException, UnmarshalOutOfBoundsException or UnknownUserException. If you are experiencing any of these exceptions, verify that your assemblies are configured correctly.
See Also