Entity Framework with Offline Storage

Question

The essence of the situation comes down to the following:

• I have a data collection system that needs to constantly update to a central database.
• The database is connected via a somewhat flaky wifi connection (that I can't get away from or fix)
• Due to the above the device needs to store the data locally as it
  could be anywhere from 30 seconds to 12 hours before the connection
  can be restored.
• The server is SQL Server 2000 (Customer is dragging feet about upgrading)
• The data collection runs on a number of Windows XP PCs

The current system uses Datasets and Diffgrams serialized to XML to deal with the local storage. I am wanting to rewrite the system using Entity Framework for my data access, however the ability to maintain an offline copy of the last few days data is essential as I need to protect against a power cut during a period of no network connectivity.

Any advice on the best approach would be greatly appreciated.

Answer 1

The Entity Framework won't directly help you with this. The Sync Framework is probably closer to what you are looking for: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/sync/bb887608