Data access technology for Silverlight and WPF standalone app versions.

Question

I am writing an applicaton that will be a standalone WPF application and also a cut down version that will work as Silverlight and so be hosted in browsers. I want the Silverlight application to access data from the cloud. The WPF application needs to work against a local database but then be able to sync with the same cloud storage.

So I need the following scenarios to work. Silverlight works directly against the data stored in the cloud. The WPF app works against a local database. But the WPF app has the ability when it starts up to go to the cloud and get the latest version in case of changes being made online since the last time the WPF app was run. When the user finishes on the WPF app it can then sync up the changes made to the cloud again. This allows better performance during WPF being run and also allows you to run it offline and sync up later when you have a connection.

What is the best technology available to do this? I know there is a Sync Framework, SQL Server Data Service, ADO.NET Entity Framework and SQL Server Compact Edition that help with data access but I am not sure if they can be made to work together to do the presented scenario.

Do I implement all this myself? Does most of it come for free and I only need to handle the syncing? If you have deep knowledge of the Microsoft data access technologies then I would appreciate your input on the design.

Answer 1

Your scenario would be easy with a standard SQL server backend. :)

However, I think what you're proposing is doable for the most part. For the WPF app and syncing to the cloud with SSDS you could use Project Huron (which has downloads coming "soon"). That would keep your SSDS data in sync with the WPF client apps.

For the silverlight side you could use the REST api of SSDS (or a helper library like SSDS Rest).

So you won't need to implement most of it yourself, but whenever you head down a road like this one there are always lots of little roadblocks to run into along the way. Have fun!