A Tour Through Microsoft Silverlight 3 RIA Services

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The main focus of Silverlight RIA Services is to provide an easy-to-use infrastructure for service-enabling Silverlight Applications, sharing of common entity classes, and performing bi-directional work with data in your Silverlight applications. Controls can be made “data aware”, and you can save a lot of time by not having to write a lot of code to be able to work with data from the server. RIA services also provides an easy way to hook in ASP.NET Membership, Role, and Profile providers to your Silverlight application, and to enable the UserContext on Silverlight controls.

Once you grasp everything that Silverlight RIA Services offers, you will see that developing data-aware LOB applications with Silverlight has just been made an order of magnitude easier. You will be able to spend your time focusing on what you want your application to do instead of spending a lot of tedious time to put in the plumbing just to get to “first base”. Silverlight RIA Services already gives you all the plumbing, and it works great.

RIA Services is composed of 12 distinct  namespaces that all work together to provide a rich data model and plumbing framework for enterprise Silverlight applications:

 

System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations Contains data Model extension metadata attributes and classes, Validation Attributes
System.Web.DomainServices Contains DomainService  and DomainServiceContext  and related classes / attributes
System.Web.DomainServices.LinqToEntities LinqToEntities related classes and ObjectContext extensions
System.Web.DomainServices.LinqToSql LinqToSql Domain Service and DataContext extensions
System.Web.DomainServices.Tools Custom MsBuild tasks to create Silverlight Client working proxy
System.Web.Ria DataServiceFactory and SilverlightApplication control for Silverlight RIA applications
System.Web.Ria.ApplicationServices User, Authentication and Profile classes to enable Membership, Roles, and Profiles
System.Web.Ria.Data AssociatedEntities, CodeProcessor, DataServiceResult for communicating data between service and client
System.Windows.Controls DomainDataSource and related classes
System.Windows.Data Descriptors and collections for grouping and sorting data
System.Windows.Ria.ApplicationServices Authentication, Login and User related classes
System.Windows.Ria.Data DomainClient, DomainContext, Entity and related classes

RIA Services provide three modalities – Framework, Tools, and Services.  Framework components support best – practices patterns for writing application logic and validation so that it can be easily used on the presentation tier. Tools add to existing Visual Studio capabilities by linking the client and mid-tier projects in a single solution and by enabling smart code generation in your Silverlight client projects. Services utilize the patterns to support commonly used capabilities such as authentication and user settings management.

.NET RIA Services focus on the end-to-end use of data. It may be retrieved through a Data Access Layer (DAL) of your choice. It can be shaped for use in the presentation tier and annotated with suitable metadata for validation and access control. The new framework components support data and metadata flow across tiers through a controlled set of operations.

There have been a number of additions and “last minute” downloads that didn’t quite make the MIX ‘09 presentation. If you want to get started with Silverlight RIA services, here are some very good links:

RIA Services Feedback Forum

What is Silverlight RIA Services?

RIA Services – from vision to architecture

Silverlight Store SEO Example

RIA Services Walkthrough Sample

Silverlight Business Application template files

Classifieds Sample

UPDATE!

Finally, here is the main info page for the May 2009 Preview. Be sure to get the PDF as well!

I also have an article at  eggheadcafe.com on  using Membership, Roles and Profile with RIA, and I intend to publish at least one additional article soon.

NOTE: In the Business Application via Template files, it states that you must have SQLEXPRESS installed to use the built-in Authentication service. This is not 100% true. You can use regular SQL Server and any database you want, as long as you have run the ASPNET_REGSQL utility on it. Then just do this in your connectionStrings section of web.config:

<connectionStrings>
    <remove name="LocalSqlServer"/>
    <add name="LocalSqlServer" connectionString ="server=(local);database=YOURDATABASENAME;Integrated Security=True"/>

Peter has been active on the C# and other MS newsgroups, has had samples at gotdotnet.com (now codegallery.com) that have been downloaded over 56,000 times, and has written numerous articles for eggheadcafe.com, for which he is a co-founder, and MSDNAA sites. He has also been a technical reviewer on books from Prentice Hall, Manning and other publishers. Peter was a Microsoft MVP for 10 years. Peter was born and raised in New York City, and after a stint as a jazz musician playing contrabass with the Robert Hunt Trio, migrated to sunny Florida, where he was hired as a rookie Financial Consultant at Merrill Lynch in Orlando, specializing in Corporate Services. It was at Merrill that Peter realized computers and technology were his forte. He spent his last few years at Merrill developing real – time computerized trading and and stock charting program using advanced technical analysis indicators, some of which are his own inventions. In 1997, he moved on to architect and serve as lead developer on a number of innovative web-based and middleware solutions for the healthcare and financial services industry.

Comments

  1. Unknown11:50 AM

    Thanks for that. I´m trying to authenticate in silverlight but from other DB for some time now...
    Great post!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Unknown1:07 AM

    Thanks for this template... web application

    ReplyDelete
  3. Merrill Marie5:15 PM

    DomainContext.Entities.

    I have a desperate, real life question/situation ..

    1. I created a Silverlight Business Application .. and have added 4 pages in addition to the main, home, and about pages.
    2. Each page is one of your completed chap 09 solutions ..
    3. On each “page” I go to my database for the Products download.
    4. Example:

    Page 1.

    I go to the SQL data and create my product context. Everything is cool.

    When I go to Page 2, why do I have to go back to the SQL database and re download the data. I think I already have it in my DomainContext.Entities.

    I am assuming that the data is in the domain universe, somewhere .. can I access it without having to return to the SQL database when I go to a new page?


    Thanks

    Frank

    ReplyDelete

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