end-to-end RIA-like client/server patterns? non-Entity Framework contexts?

Question

I have posted this same question in the msdn forums, but nothing yet .. http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wcf/thread/60cf36d1-c11a-4d8a-9446-f1d299db1222

I'm working on a project that is an MVC app that will be sourced data via a WCF service that may or may not be getting data via EF, but will definitely be using Stored Procedures..

The MVC app will maintain state in the session, and the entity-tracking portion of this state would preferably function much like the RIA Services DomainContext. Whether or not this context encapsulates saves and changesets is not really all that important, but how entities are loaded into the context and relate to one another (navigation properties) are.

Question 1: Is there such a pattern/solution in existence?

Question 2: Should the MVC and WCF layers share the same DTOs/Entities via a class library? (thereby maintaining state-awareness, navigation properties, etc on both ends of the pipe?)

Question 3: Does using WCF Data Services help solve these problems?

Question 4: Is this all misguided and is there a better approach?

Answer 1

Pretty basic stuff here..

The solution is use a WCF Data Service, and in the client add a Service Reference pointing to it. The client-side proxy will include a proxy and the context classes I was looking for, similar to RIA. If you're accustomed to RIA, there will be some differences and caveats, but by and large it's easy to work through and provides a client-side proxy to your server-side ObjectContext (or whatever repository you expose through the DataService)