Silverlight3: What to use: WebClient or database with RIA

Question

Hello, I'm asking for the advice. I'm working at the Silverlight 3 application and now I should select the mean how to save the information and get it. I could save the necessary info in files (from 1 to 300K size) or I could save them in database. If I would use WebClient for accessing to separate file there's very low loading of the server. If I get data from database the server would load much more I think and the code on the server too.

Please correct me if I'm not right. I'm looking forward to hearing from you! Thanks

Answer 1

If you are saving and loading the entire file at a time, then it might be okay to use a WebClient. This might take a little coding to handle errors that may result in incomplete saves.

If you're serializing some objects or xml data and storing that in a file, then you should probably be using a database instead.

Edit: It can be a pain to get WebClient or HttpWebRequest working correctly with GET/POST, but WCF can also be a pain to configure if you haven't done it before. WCF is probably better style, and you'll want to use a binary binding and send the file across as a byte[].