Silverlight app errors when WCF Contract Has Sync Operations

For a WCF service, it does not matter what type of client is invoking it. .NET, Java, PHP or whatever based, as long has the consumer conforms to the W3* standards. For a WCF proxy however, it does matter what type of .NET client is using it to invoke WCF operations. Although a regular CLR-based client supports both synchronous and asynchronous invocations of the WCF service, a Silverlight client only allows asynchronous operations. In a Proof-of-Concept setup in which I have both a regular WebPart (server side operation) and a Silverlight application (client side operation) hosted in a SharePoint portal, I dealt with this by letting the Silverlight strictly use the asynchronous methods. This worked perfectly in my development environment. However, running at the remote test-server, I get an error indication in the browser when trying to invoke from the Silverligth client an asynchronous method on the WCF proxy. Even although the Silverlight code only uses the asynchronous methods, the Silverlight runtime checks at forehand whether the proxy contract also supports synchronous operations, and if so errors out:

Error: Unhandled Error in Silverlight2 Application [ContractHasSyncOperations]
Arguments:IExpensesHandlingAsync

The quick fix in the PoC is to exclude the synchronous methods when compiling the interface/contract for Silverlight client usage, and included in the .xap package. This can be done through a check on the conditional symbol SILVERLIGHT. This way, it is still possible to code-reuse and share a single interface sourcefile, both for non-Silverlight and Silverlight clients.