11. Accessing External Data

THERE ARE SOME CHALLENGES inherent in accessing external data from a SharePoint web part or other user interface extension. SharePoint’s Business Connectivity Services (BCS) addresses these challenges, so it should be no surprise that this chapter includes a section on how to set up BCS and use it from Silverlight. However you also learn how to access external data from Silverlight without BCS so you can directly access web services, newsfeeds, and other network resources in your solutions.

One challenge is that for security reasons, sandboxed solution code isn’t allowed to make network calls. For example, if you wanted to write an RSS reader that runs in a sandboxed solution, it wouldn’t be possible to read the RSS ...

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