ASP.NET reference a LINQ to SQL class in Silverlight from its origin in the models of MVC?

Question

I am working on an mvc app that uses some silverlight to supplement a page and instead of having to maintain two separate linq to sql classes I want to add a reference to the main project from the silverlight project but this can't be done through the normal method of just adding a reference, anyone have a workaround?

Answer 1

The normal way to do this is to create a new Silverlight class library project, and use "add as link" to add the existing files from your non-Silverlight project. You can then reference the new project in your main Silverlight project without duplicating any of the files.

Note that if you want to add the LINQ to SQL classes, just add the generated .designer.cs file to the new project--AFAIK dbml files themselves aren't supported in Silverlight projects. You will also need to stub out the L2S attributes present in the classes: ColumnAttribute, FunctionAttribute, and so on.

This may be more trouble than it's worth--if your goal is to communicate with the server using classes generated from a database, you might consider using the Entity Data Model with ADO.NET Data Services (the combination of which is intended for this purpose) instead of LINQ to SQL.