.NET support for application's offline capability

Question

We have this scenario in a production environment, where desktop applications in production require some data provided by web service to work. We would like to assure that even if the network is down or a machine hosting the web service is down, the applications will still run. To do that we need to cache some data from the web service (and the underlying database) locally. We are currently thinking about a custom solution with a local database that would cache the required data but I just started wondering if there are any dedicated mechanisms/technologies within a .NET environment to support such an offline scenario?

Answer 1

There is synch framework

Synchronizing SQL Server and SQL Server Compact

Answer 2

If you just want to "cache" some data locally, I would suggest to serialize the data returned from the web service to a file, so you won't have to deal with deploying database.