Over the w/end I was helping a mate with his Data-driven Silverlight app.

I was gobsmacked that his developer spent days and weeks writing plumbing code, hand coding infrastructure code and even worse my friend had to pay for it.
Being able to focus on the business needs is important so having a development platform that better enables that focus and increased productivity is an absolute must.

The solution to this problem is codenamed Alexandria i.e. .NET RIA Services, this technology provides a set of server components and ASP.NET extensions that ease the n-tier development process, making your applications almost as easy to develop as if they were running on a single tier, In addition, services such as authentication, roles and profile management are provided. The combination of client and server enhancements to Silverlight 3 and ASP.NET along with the addition of .NET RIA Services, streamline the end-to-end experience of developing data-driven Web applications also known as Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs.

I’m not going to show you how to do it as there are many-many training resources available but a good place to start is here: http://silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices/

So if you find yourself writing needless plumbing code for a DAL in Silverlight, then spend some time figuring RIA services out!
(Spend some get some diesel for that digger and opposed to grabbing a shovel and diving in!!)