Passing Entities Between WCF and Silverlight

I’ve been writing away about binding modes, ObservableCollections, XAML binding goodness, WCF, SOAP, Cross domain policies, converters, and third party web services … but tonight I started writing about passing entities between physical tiers in a Silverlight application. I know this material cold, but the hardest part of writing this chapter is deciding on what to include and what to exclude.

I want to deal with passing entities and Silverlight, that is the focus. So I am writing about creating services that can pass them, how to set them up, how to consume them, etc. But then I can get into custom entities, LINQ to SQL, NHibernate, Entity Framework, Paul WIlson’s ORMapper, and more. I really don;t want this to turn into a crazy entity book … even though I love this topic …. so I won’t go there.

I decided that I will discuss using entity models from some of these tools. But the main focus will remain true to how to use models with Silverlight. The chapter also discusses other topics, too … but this one topic could have been blown out of proportion :) If you want to learn EF, LINQ to SQL or NHibernate, there are better books to choose form. This book is for intermediate developers who want to learn how to deal with data and services with Silverlight.