MS Access to ASP.NET MVC 3 via SharePoint: using Linq to SharePoint

I am trying to see if you can use Microsoft Access Services, as available in Access 2010, to synchronise data between an MVC web app, and a Microsoft Access desktop solution.

If you publish the Access app backend via Access Services to a sharepoint. This works fine, and you could use Web Databases to use that, but... sadly, there are limitations to Web Databases.

So, if I can get the data into SharePoint lists, and these lists will synch with the Access tables, then all I need is to access the sharepoint lists from the MVC app, hey presto, you have an MVC app that synchs with an Access desktop app.

So the questions are:

Will the above idea work?

And:

How do you access sharepoint lists from an ASP.NET MVC 3 app?

In an attempt to answer this myself, I came across the following:

On MSDN, there is an article on Linq to Sha开发者_C百科rePoint. As I understand it, this intended for use in SharePoint, but there seems no reason why this could not be used from an MVC app, EXCEPT that there is no available reference Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq from Visual Studio 2010 Professional.

Presumably, this reflects the fact that the Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq namespace is only available to code running in a SharePoint site?

Which would leave third party tooling, unless there is a native way for .NET to access SharePoint lists. In that respect:

Is there a native way for .NET to access SharePoint lists?

And:

Do you know of any third party library or code samples for accessing sharepoint lists from an MVC 3 app?

Presumably, someone has already tried to do this. So:

Do you know of any links to read more on this subject?

To get the Microsoft.SharePoint.Linq namespace just install SharePoint server Trial(on a virtual machine preferably) and then copy the DLL from the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\Web Server Extension\14\ASAPI\ directory to the BIN folder of your MVC3 Application and reference it within your project.

To query the SharePoint list you might need other DLLs which are in that folder as well(by the way the \14\ directory is AKA "The 14th hive").