I’ll be embarking on converting one of our old, legacy apps from VB6 to WPF soon. More than a year ago I had spent a considerable amount of time converting the middle-tier VB6 components (all in Component Services) to WCF. At the time I did it, I wrote all of the methods to return ADO.NET datasets. It works fine, and writing a simple WinForms app I was able to successfully pull some of the data over and save it back. And I haven’t touched that WCF service for several months. I wrote the WCF service using VS 2008.
I’ve been busy with other responsibilities and other urgent projects during 2010, so this conversion project has been put on the back burner until now. One of these other projects was developing a simple WPF app to learn how to write WPF apps. This simple WPF app is now in use by our front office staff. For this major conversion app I will use VS 2010, but I know that WCF 3.5 and WPF 4.0 will work together, that’s not an issue. But what does bother me, is the fact that all of the WCF methods return ADO.NET datasets. While learning WPF and developing the front office app, I developed classes that reflect the data in the SQL Server database, so that my classes could implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. Well, certainly my WCF classes don’t implement the INotifyPropertyChanged interface. Now that I’ve got a chance to look at this whole thing, from a high level view, I’m concerned that I’ve basically shot myself in the foot (hey, I was ignorant and didn’t know any better). So, is it the case that any WPF app I write won’t work ideally with the ADO.NET datasets returned by my WCF service?
I am assuming that the data from these ADO.NET data sets are going to be set to the source for one or more WPF controls. In this case it would be really nice if the control could just keep track of changes in the data without you having to do anything. Since I don’t know any specific details I can’t say anything in particular, although I do have some general advice that might help.
INotifyPropertyChanged is a handy method that allows one to avoid writing a lot of boilerplate code. Certainly if you want to have all of the bells and whistles that come along with this method you could add methods to your project that can keep track of changes in your data and update WPF controls appropriately. If there are only a few ways in which the data can be changed then this isn’t a very daunting task.
On the other hand you could create wrapper classes for the ADO.NET data sets that do implement the INotifyPropertyChanged method. This essentially boils down to implementing the same code from the previous idea but it can look a whole lot nicer and create a much cleaner code base.