We ve got a smart client that talks to a SQL Server database via WCF, displaying the entities in the database, and allowing the user to edit those entities.
Some of the WCF calls return a large data set. Since this data set doesn t change very often, I m considering some sort of write-through cache on the client, and only getting the deltas from the WCF service.
That is: the client both reads from the service and writes to the service.
I m not looking for disconnected/offline operation, but since the majority of the data doesn t change very often, I d probably implement this with a local data store.
I don t want the local store to get too stale, and I don t think I m too concerned about conflict resolution, because updates will always go straight to the WCF service -- think of it as a write-through cache.
Would Microsoft s Sync Framework be good for this? Could I use a local SQL-CE cache and perform the updates over WCF? The service end has a SQL Server 2005/2008 backend, but I don t want to talk to it directly. Does Sync Framework integrate well with WCF?
Are there other solutions out there? Should I roll something myself?