Using data services with silverlight 3?

Question

Any thoughts on ADO.NET data services and Entity Framework with silverlight 3? It is a good pratice?

Answer 1

Yes, it's a good practice.

You get a lot of functionality needed for building Silverlight application (e.g. bindings, client side entity classes, context changes tracking, etc.) for free. One note: you are not limited to entity framework as your data provider for ADO.NET Data Service - you can easily plug in other data providers as well (LLBLGen, for example, has a template that allows to use LLBLGen framework with ADO.Net Data Services)

Also it seems that the plans are to make more and more data services accessible via ADO.NET Data Services (just recently Astoria team announced that they'd be adding Sharepoint) Thus choosing ADO.NET Data Services as a layer Silverlight client talks to makes a very good strategic sense, as you'll be able to easily reuse whatever libraries, patterns, approaches you discover for all different types of backends (being that a database, Azure cloud, Reporting Services, Sharepoint, etc.) It's clearly invaluable for portal types of applications whose whole purpose is to aggregate data from multiple data source.

Answer 2

That is one approach you can take to get data into Silverlight. Another approach is RIA Services which I think is a better approach and seems to have a higher adoption rate. Determining if it is good practice will depend on your implementation of it, not on the technology itself.