How can I architect my data layer to yield query result pages to the application as SQL Server prepares them?

Question

I tried to make the question as explicit as possible.
Refer to Sql Server Management Studio's Results view.  Depending upon the structure of the execution plan, the Results pane may begin displaying results while the query is still executing.  Can someone point me in a direction for architecting a
data layer (I am tech and framework agnostic for this task. Any solution will suffice) that will begin receiving pages of the set before SQL Server has completed the entire query?
The call from the data layer to SQL Server will obviously have to be asynchronous, but is there any additional ceremony that I need to be aware of when issuing OPTION (FAST x) to the query optimizer?

Answer 1

Thanks for the reply. (I actually meant to put this in the SQL Data Access forum, not the T-SQL forum)
"Generally the last step is ORDER BY in a
query, so nothing can start before that executes."
I would imagine you cannot ORDER BY and yield results as they are fetched because of the execution plan that would be generated.  For the purposes of this post, please assume that sorting will be done purely client side
"Can you post your query?"
 For purposes of discussion, let's assume that the query is
select *
from information_schema.columns
and also assume that you have "lots" of columns to display.
This was an exploratory question to see what would be necessary to replicate the behavior of Management Studio's Query Result view in a custom application. 
I would imagine that there's going to be a lot of analysis of the execution plans that get generated in order for the OPTION (FAST x) optimizer hint to do any good, but apart from general tuning concerns that would allow SQL SERVER to yield a page of data
"fast", I was wondering if there was anything else required of the calling client to force it to yield return its first page.
After thinking about this (and phrasing it the way I did in the last sentence) perhaps this is the incorrect forum for this question.  I imagine that my concerns are better addressed in forums dedicated to the technology of the calling client (which
would be a .NET assembly)
Be that as it may, if there is any ceremony that SQL Server imposes on clients in order to yield return, I would expect that my question would be in the scope of SQL Server discussions (even though I intended this to be in a different SQL Server forum)