Data-Driven Services with Silverlight 2

ADO.NET Data Services over the Entity Framework

When Silverlight 2 and ADO.NET Data Services communicate with each other, they form a symbiotic relationship. Silverlight 2 makes requests and passes information to ADO.NET Data Services, and ADO.NET Data Services provides a client library for Silverlight 2 to make the requests and serves up the information. The rest of this chapter demonstrates many of the features and possibilities that exist in this symbiosis through a sample application built on the Entity Framework, ADO.NET Data Services, REST, and Silverlight 2. The sample, found in EFDataServices in this chapter’s sample code, also demonstrates authorization techniques and how to perform operations outside the standard URIs exposed by ADO.NET Data Services.

Out of the box, you can access the Entity Framework via the RESTful nature of ADO.NET Data Services. Once you have built an entity data model using the Entity Framework, you can access it through ADO.NET Data Services to perform CRUD operations, paging, and sorting, and to handle change tracking, implement transactions, and handle eager and delayed loading.

ADO.NET Data Services can be an integral component in a Silverlight 2 application’s architecture. Although ADO.NET Data Services provides services to a variety of clients, its RESTful nature and its Silverlight 2 client library included in the System.Data.Services.Client library make it ideal for communicating with Silverlight 2. In the next section, we will build an entity ...