Chapter 7. Data Services in the Cloud – an Overview of ADO.NET and Entity Framework

Every application that is dependent on data should have storage that will be used for that data. It can be memory storage, a file on the local or remote disk, or a database. Each storage type has its own characteristics; for example, if we use memory or a local disk, we are merging two different application layers—the data access layer and the store itself—and we don't have a really effective way of managing the fault tolerance of our solution as it is limited to local storage. Sometimes this is good—for example, when we are developing an application that will be or should be small and fault-tolerant. If we want to develop an application that is fault-tolerant (for example, if one server does not respond, the user would still have access to his information) and have code that is easy to maintain, we have to split application layers.

In this chapter we will go through...