Which is the most suitable method for Data Access in Silverlight 3?

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+2 Q:

Which is the most suitable method for Data Access in Silverlight 3?

We are planning to move to Silverlight 3 for application development because we want to take advantage of more flexible UIs and easier deployment. We have previously used Winforms with ADO.Net and SQL Server for data driven applications.

I've briefly looked at some of the options for data access with silverlight such as Entity Framework and Linq to SQL etc. But due to the pace of Silverlight development by Microsoft I do not know which method is the 'correct' method, and feel slightly overwhelmed by the options.

Can you suggest the best method for data access that I should pursue further reading on? Which methods should be avoided or are obselete?

If possible point me in the direction of a good comparison which I can't seem to find.

+2 A:

The technology that best suits you would be WCF RIA Services around Entity Framework.

Why Silverlight 3? VS2010 + Silverlight 4 is a much more mature platform for this type of Line-of-Business application.

That said, the biggest leap facing you is going from WinForms to Xaml based Silverlight UI.

AnthonyWJones 2010-04-29 09:58:34

XAML is no problem. I'm from more of a web background with knowledge of XML HTML and Flex's MXML. So that all seems very familiar.Simple answer for the Silverlight 4 question is that we don't have VS2010. It may be something we will have to consider.

Banford 2010-04-29 10:09:13

@Banford: OK, the WCF RIA Services with Entity Framework is is still the approach of choice even with Silverlight 3 but it would be much easier with VS2010 which is a far better tool for this job.

AnthonyWJones 2010-04-29 10:54:48

just interested why you recommend RIA vs Data Services?

Nix 2010-04-29 12:41:18

@Nix: A Data Service is designed to be a more open API where the application that consumes the data and the source of that data are significantly more de-coupled. In particular it is generally expected that the vendor of a data source would be a third-party. However when building a LOB app using RIA (especially under VS2010) is a much more joined up experience which will allow faster iteration of the application dev.

AnthonyWJones 2010-04-29 14:17:09

We managed to get RIA services working in VS2008 but have now moved to VS2010 + Silverlight 4 because it proved to be easier than the 2008 method.

Banford 2010-05-05 16:10:34

ansaurus

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Which is the most suitable method for Data Access in Silverlight 3?

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