I am working on porting an old application to Silverlight (version 5). The application has many forms with combo boxes who’s items are conditionally populated. This is being handled in the old application through an Access database stored within the application and queried using the DAO object library. I was thinking Silverlight would let me mimic this functionality, but I found out that Silverlight does not allow for local database storage and manipulation (please correct me if I am wrong). I cannot go the web service route for database manipulation because this app has to work offline and Out of Browser on Mac and Windows.
So, I am looking for alternatives. It seems that I can use XML and LINQ to achieve a sort of quasi-database. My question regarding this is will it still work on Mac and Windows platforms? Any other alternatives are also welcome.
Thanks for all of the suggestions given. I’m going with Brad’s suggestion in the comments on the question and using IsolatedStorage. While I wish I could just use COM and MS SQL CE, I need cross-platform. I also wish I could just use a third-party solution, but we are trying to not have dependencies on third party software and stay away from extra costs too.
Linq to XML is proving to be very useful: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb387087.aspx