Last night I was at Dallas .NET User Group meeting where Tony Sneed of DevelopMentor made a presentation on WCF RIA Services called “Turbocharge Silverlight Development with WCF RIA Services“. I had read about this new technology before, but never had the time to play with it.
The presentation turned out to be pretty cool. I think WCF RIA Services provides a very neat way to design n-tier apps without much hassle as it takes care of much of the heavy lifting for you providing very easy data validation, authentication, and role-based security amongst other awesomeness. Also through code projection it automatically allows shared code between UI and the service tier, which makes it easy to write code once and use it cross-tier. While WCF RIA Services can be used with any front-end, e.g. WinForms and ASP.NET, it really shines when combined with a Silverlight front-end. The best part of the technology is automatic batch updates, which is really neat.
Download and Install
- Install WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4
- Install WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010
- Install the WCF RIA Services Toolkit
- If you already have the Silverlight 4 Tools and Visual Studio 2010 installed you can download WCF RIA Services V1.0 directly
- Install WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4
- Install WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010
- Install the WCF RIA Services December 2010 Toolkit for WCF RIA Services SP1 Beta
