C H A P T E R  4

Exposing Data from the Server

By their very nature, business applications are highly data-centric applications. Therefore, one of the primary concerns you will have when designing your Silverlight business application is how you will expose data from the server, and then consume that data in your application.

For example, a typical Silverlight business application will want to request data from the server, make changes to it, and then pass any changes back to the server to be stored.

There are numerous means to achieve this workflow in Silverlight, but it can often be difficult to determine the best and most appropriate technology to use. Ultimately, WCF RIA Services is generally the best solution to implement this functionality and, thus, is the primary technology that we will focus on throughout this book. We will, however, also briefly discuss some of the alternative means and technologies for exposing data from the server, should you find that RIA Services does not suit your needs.

When working with data in a Silverlight application, there are two key parts you need to take care of: exposing the data from the server, and consuming it in your application. In this chapter, we'll be focusing solely on how to expose data from the server; we'll cover consuming that data in your Silverlight application in the following chapter.