Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

Summary

This chapter showed that individual ORM tools can expose domain entity models to Silverlight through WCF web services with relative ease. Although the models differ in how they work, Silverlight can interact with them all as plain entities as long as the objects can be serialized and sent through a web service.

Custom entities as well as entities created from LINQ to SQL, the Entity Framework, and many other ORM tools can be serialized and passed between WCF web services and Silverlight client applications. Web services and data contract serialization bridge the gap between the Silverlight client application and robust web services. This ability to reach web services that describe themselves (those that use SOAP, such as WCF web services and ASMX web services) by consuming and passing entities back and forth allows Silverlight applications to take advantage of complex data structures without having to parse results from a stream or XML.

Although this chapter showed how to expose entities through SOAP-based web services, you also can expose entities using REST services. Later chapters will demonstrate how to do this using the ADO.NET Data Services framework.