Enhanced Data Binding

Out-of-the-box data binding support, both in Entity Framework and in RIA Services, is limited to binding to the same query result that was originally retrieved from the server. In other words, you can neither bind to a subset of, nor reshape in any way, the original query. Also, an out-of-the-box data source control (DomainDataSource) is available only for RIA Services in Silverlight, and it has serious limitations such as disallowing paging and filtering unless all data changes are committed to the database.

DataSource for Entity Framework provides data source controls for direct access to Entity Framework, for both WPF and for WinForms, as well as for RIA Services (free from the standard DomainDataSource limitations).

Apart from the data source controls, C1DataSource supports creating live views that allow easy declarative reshaping of collections for two-way live data binding, which includes not just sorting and filtering but also calculated fields and any LINQ operations. Using live views, developers can express a significant part, if not all, of application logic with declarative data binding producing shorter and more reliable code. Also, by defining live views over entity collections, a developer can create a view model layer in the application making it follow the popular MVVM (model-view-view model) pattern with very little code for creating a view model and no code at all for synchronizing it with the model, a task that without C1DataSource would require extensive manual coding.