We are planning to move to Silverlight 3 for application development because we want to take advantage of more flexible UIs and easier deployment. We have previously used Winforms with ADO.Net and SQL Server for data driven applications.
I’ve briefly looked at some of the options for data access with silverlight such as Entity Framework and Linq to SQL etc. But due to the pace of Silverlight development by Microsoft I do not know which method is the ‘correct’ method, and feel slightly overwhelmed by the options.
Can you suggest the best method for data access that I should pursue further reading on? Which methods should be avoided or are obselete?
If possible point me in the direction of a good comparison which I can’t seem to find.
The technology that best suits you would be WCF RIA Services around Entity Framework.
Why Silverlight 3? VS2010 + Silverlight 4 is a much more mature platform for this type of Line-of-Business application.
That said, the biggest leap facing you is going from WinForms to Xaml based Silverlight UI.