Shawn Burke, an Architect on Microsoft’s Silverlight team, recently introduced AgFx, a framework for creating Windows Phone 7 applications that simplifies data access and storage.
With AgFx, developers need only to specify the source of information (generally a Web Service), how to parse it within the application, and expiration rules. After that, data retrieval, caching and refreshes are handled automatically. The framework makes it possible to define flexible rules about how long the data in cache is valid, where to store it, and what to do with invalid cache items.
The most recent release of AgFx on CodePlex allows developers to manually add items to the cache, and includes helper classes for login and authentication, an additional cache policy that allows data to reside in the cache indefinitely, and statistics collection for improved debugging. AgFx can also take advantage of OAuth for authentication.
The developers have provided an extensive tutorial covering how to configure AgFx and bind it to the user interface in Windows Phone 7 applications; they note that it works within desktop Silverlight as well.