Entity classes decoupled from LINQ to SQL provider for implementing the Repository pattern. How?

Question

I have looked over the Repository pattern and I recognized some ideas that I was using in the past which made me feel well.

However now I would like to write an applicat

Answer 1

The simplest way would be to decouple your entities from the datacontext: load the needed entity, decouple it from the DataContext, use it however you like, later use Attach() to couple it with a DataContext for saving.

Sadly LINQ has no method to decouple entities from a datacontext, but you can just clone them, that works nicely. Simplest way would be something like this:

public static T CloneEntity(T source)
{
  DataContractSerializer dcs = new DataContractSerializer(typeof(T));
  using (Stream stream = new MemoryStream())
  {
    dcs.WriteObject(stream, source);
    stream.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
    return (T)dcs.ReadObject(stream);
  }
}