I need your help and have only been working with the ESRI Silverlight API for 2 week. We need a simple example on how to create a simple Silverlight-enabled WCF Service that inserts updates and can delete data from a feature layer.
You can leverage the ESRI classes in that case (no need to build your own WCF service). Follow these steps:
Using ArcCatalog, import or create your feature classes into an SDE database.
Register the feature classes as versioned (right-click->register as versioned)
In ArcMap, drag and drop the feature classes to an MXD, and setup any symbology you want there.
Save the MXD and publish to ArcGIS server with Feature Access and Editing options checked.
Add a feature layer to your silverlight map with the url property set to your new feature service (http://[servername]/ArcGIS/rest/services/[foldername]/[servicename]/FeatureService/[0,1,2,3, etc])
This is a very good example to get you started: Geometry to WCF
Once you've made WCF insert, delete and update operations, you have a few options:
You can make featureserver calls from the WPF version of the ESRI Silverlight API, which is the safest & easiest bet.
You can send HTTPRequests directly to the ESRI REST service, but you'll have to parse the response.
You can directly edit the database with C#, offers the most control out of all the options, but you could seriously corrupt your database if you don't know what you're doing.
If you already have ArcGIS Server 10, there's absolutely no reason to use WCF. The FeatureLayer already fully supports editing and saving back to the server. The WCF approach mentioned in the blogpost is really for scenarios not involving ArcGIS Server.
The reason I need to create a web service is that we are going to have other application consume the service. All the example I have seen on the forums and sdk show how it is done directly from a Silverlight application.
