Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

Chapter 11. Silverlight 2 and ADO.NET Data Services

The RESTful style of web services exposes representations of resources through unique URIs and query strings. Silverlight 2 can communicate with these resources using WebClient or HttpWebRequest as you have seen in the previous chapters. Alternatively, Silverlight 2 can communicate with services using the ADO.NET Data Services Silverlight client and to ADO.NET Data Services, as this chapter will demonstrate. Silverlight 2 can then consume the services using techniques such as LINQ to XML or LINQ to JSON, and translate the results into entities which you can bind to dependency properties in Silverlight 2 applications. ADO.NET Data Services provides an architecture that uses a RESTful-style web service that handles some of the heavy lifting and provides a rich set of functionality. ADO.NET Data Services is not a data access layer; rather, it helps client applications communicate with business layers and their entity models. It provides the architecture to consume resources and map them into entities, manage change tracking and save changes through a client API in Silverlight 2, expose an entire entity model via URIs with very little code, and customize the services by adding specialized service operations and the means to intercept service calls and perform business rules. There is a server and a client component with ADO.NET Data Services when working with Silverlight 2. On the server, ADO.NET Data Services provides the services ...