With Silverlight 4 and the Entity Framework you get a lot of work done on your behalf in terms of standard UI CRUD-style operations. Validations and I/O are pretty easy to accommodate out of the box. But sometimes you need to perform some long running tasks either on the client or on the server via service calls. To prevent your UI from hanging and annoying your users, you should consider placing these operations on a background thread. The BackgroundWorker object is the perfect solution for this...(read more)