SilverLight 2 and ADO.Net Data Services – Better Together

theADOguy - Using ADO.NET Data Services in Silverlight 2 Beta 2

URL: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/bb931106.aspx

Now that Silverlight 2 Beta 2 has launched, we have the ability to consume ADO.NET Data Services (formerly Astoria) from within Silverlight projects. ADO.NET Data Services are a perfect match for client-side technologies like Silverlight and ASP.NET AJAX.

For the uninitiated, ADO.NET Data Services is a new part of the .NET 3.5 framework that supports exposing a data model (e.g. LINQ for SQL, Entity Framework, etc.) as a set of queryable REST endpoints. ADO.NET Data Services maps the four data verbs into the four HTTP verbs:

• Create == PUT
• Read == GET
• Update == POST
• Delete == DELETE

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While its not as straightforward as synchronous execution, the new ADO.NET Data Services certainly works well in Silverlight 2 Beta 2 and provides a great way to use existing or planned data models over Internet applications. There are a couple of caveats:

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I am currently working on two examples for this (a simple one and a more complex one) as well as an article for MSDN, all of which will greatly expand the details of how to use ADO.NET Data Services (including how to save changes back to the server. Be sure to watch here for details of those samples and articles.”

Shawn provides a nice overview of using SilverLight 2 and ADO.Net Data Services together. While the SilverLight side is still a little rough (Not Shawn’s work, but the fact SL2 is still beta), this still provides a view of what I currently believe will be a common future, SL2 and ADO.NET DS being used together.