Working with Data

Abstract

Data can take many forms, from simple types passed back from web services to complex formats such as XML. In the previous chapter, you saw how to consume web services from Silverlight and connect to various servers, including ones that live outside your application’s host domain and others that communicate over sockets. Once you have data, though, you must process it and/or display it to users. Silverlight 3 provides an enhanced DataGrid control, new DataForm and DataPager controls, a data binding architecture to connect data to user interface elements, and even item templates for controls like the ListBox to specifically define how each item should appear. On the data-processing side, Silverlight provides a number of classes for working with XML, including Language Integrated Query (LINQ), which was introduced in .NET 3.5 on Windows (but remember, while Silverlight is based on .NET 3.5, it has no dependence on .NET Framework 3.5!). Another important aspect to data is how to save data on the client. While you can use cookies, Silverlight provides something called isolated storage that provides file system semantics for saving and loading data. Let’s dig into all this support Silverlight provides for working with data.