Jeff Prosise examines one of the most useful but yet little-known new features of Silverlight 3 - the client networking stack.
In Silverlight 3, networking is still performed using the browser’s HTTP stack by default. But the new client stack allows you to bypass the browser and do your networking through the operating system. The table below lists important differences between the browser stack and the client stack. With the client stack, for example, SOAP faults can be handled properly since the operating system doesn't alter HTTP response codes. And with the client stack, you can use additional HTTP commands such as PUT and DELETE because while browsers may not expose that capability, operating systems do.