If you're a regular reader of my blog, you'll probably remember my pithy blog post where I stated that "It all depends..." to the question "Which Data Access Should I Use for Silverlight 3?" The reality is that much like the similar question I am confronted with at user groups for the past decade ("What data access should I use in my .NET app?"). The reasons for picking a strategy are wide and varied so I will not try to analyze all possible outcomes, but I think the different strategies need to be explained better.
As RIA Services is plodding towards a release, many people are looking at it to help them with validation of data in Silverlight. Using this validation in Silverlight 3 is pretty straightforward but there are some caveats. I want to show you under the covers so you understand what is happening. In this first part of the series, let's look at what it means to use validation from the outside.
Url: http://www.silverlightdata.com
Url: http://blogs.msdn.com/pablo/archive/2009/08/21/...
Url: http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2009/...
Url: http://wildermuth.com/Talks#SQL_Saturday___Atla...
Url: http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/...
Url: http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2009/...
Url: http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2009/...
Url: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596523091/index....
Url: http://www.silverlightshow.net/shows/Consuming-...
This all started with an innocent question by Bob Archer on Twitter. Bob wondered whether he could use ADO.NET Data Services in an application that was being touted as "Software as a Service" (SaaS). His concern was the apparent hard wiring of the Data Source in the DataService definition. This design might assume that you had to connect to a single database for all requests.
Url: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/cc7942...
Url: http://www.silverlightdata.com
Url: http://www.microsoft.com/azure/data.mspx
Url: http://blogs.msdn.com/astoriateam/archive/2008/...
Url: http://sourceforge.net/projects/nhcontrib/
If you haven't read Part 1 yet, you can read it here.
I have been diving pretty deep into ADO.NET Data Services (see an upcoming article about ADO.NET Data Services and Silverlight 2 coming soon). I've been looking at the story around non-Entity Framework models through a Data Service and thought that NHibernate through a Data Service would be a great example.