For now there are no good solutions yet, but we're working on the first one of them: DisconnectedState. I know single example is better than lots of words, so I just published it.

The next logical step here will be object-to-object mapper with LINQ support. And, as far as I feel, that's all we must support.

All our objects are really MBVs, but we did this mainly to prevent usage of our entities via .NET Remoting by regular way. They can be serialized and deserialize as well, but as you suspect, you need active Session to deserialize them; moreover, currently serialization is actually a serialization of references. I.e. when you serialize Entity e1 and deserialize it as e2, the only requirement we satisfy is that e2.Key==e1.Key. So serialization we provide for entities actually allows to resurrect them in another Session with their current state; their original state won't be resurrected.

Fill descriptors aren't necessary now. You can fill the DisconnectedState by doing anything that "pulls" the data out of the database. When you pull some Entity or EntitySet data by this way, be sure it will be cached in DisconnectedState. Btw, I forgot to mention there is MergeOptions as well - they define the behavior of handling conflicts between already cached and just pulled out data.

As you see, now we allow to use the same Entities and logic on the client. If you'd like to check if it is really client-side Session, use Session.IsDisconnected or Session.Options properties. I mentioned that initially we deliver everything as change set containing low-level operations only, but later we'll record really invoked actions.

And about security: we're going to start works on it before the end of this month. Right now we need this ASAP to port MEScontrol to DO4.

Until now we just discovered this is a result of bug in phpBB that exposes itself just on Windows. It seems there is no any good solution for now. I'll try to unsubscribe you manually. If this won't work, it's a good idea to manually change your e-mail to some non-existing one, or simply follow all the e-mails this forum sends immediately to trash.

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