SilverlightShow: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I Comments

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( zoltan.arvai) — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 11:00:11 +0300

Hi bobmar!

When you configure your Profile in ASP.NET you can provide such things as application name. this property can be useful in situations like yours. So you waht you have to do is to configure your WCF config file and tell the profile porvider that the application name is the same as in your asp.net application.

Something like this:

                  name="myProvider"
          type="System.Web.Profile.SqlProfileProvider"
          connectionStringName="myconnection"
          applicationName="MyApplication" />



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RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( zoltan.arvai) — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 14:17:45 +0300

R: What do you mean? With RIA Services you expose a service that can be used by multiple clients. Or you mean by the same instance?

Sean: Honestly I haven't considered writing about Prism, most of the time simple MVVM and now MEF seems to be enough for me / us and I consider Prism a little heavyweight. But if Prism articles are wanted I'm definietly in, since for complex application development it is a key technology :)

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Sean) — Sat, 05 Dec 2009 15:13:15 +0300

Hi Zoltan, would you be adding Prism to your series? A lot of people have been blogging on the RIAServices, showing the new features. It will be nice if you could put in more particular use of different patterns with RIAService.

thanks!

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( R) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 09:41:09 +0300

I really liked the way you have explained it...

I am looking for documentation which explains "How to use mulple clients against same server (DomainService)"? Please let me know if you are aware of some...

R...

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Donald) — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 08:20:04 +0300

More code if strongly typed, I agree. However, I'm not using strongly typed datasets and the generated schemas are at

runtime. The code is small. It's not non-typed datasets, but rather meta-data defined type datasets.
I can understand if you do not agree.. since the first few times I tried to go it.. it wasn't pretty. However, that

never means it cannot be done.

Excuse my poor attempt here to express my meaning, but I'll try: What I meant by Not Everyone is good at writing

"Software" is this:

Our company does outsourcing for another software company. The leader of that company told me if I could write

software that someone could take and create hundreds of forms in a week, then my value would be more than that of one

who only did 10 forms a week.
If I wrote some code that was fixed and not easily changed such as:
ds.Customers then my code would actually be more like hardware, it's fixed. But if I did this:
ds.Tables[someTableName] then my code would be something someone else could reuse. This would be software.

No, I'm not saying their not good at writing software... they are the brains behind the awesome DataSet. However,

they dropped the ball in not carrying it over to Silverlight. Now they're trying to reinvent the wheel, but I do not see yet how it can be as flexible as the DataSet. Now others have to pick up the ball like DevExpress.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Zoltan Arvai) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 12:32:57 +0300

"No need to generate schemas as they are generated automatically by the adaptor according to the select statement passed in. "

This is exactly what I said. You won't have smaller code because if you use strongly typed datasets code will be generated.

"Our non-typed solutions wins everytime. Saves time, coding, testing... etc. And it's beautiful."

Yeah, we really don't agree on the last sentence :) However your way is definetly is a way to go and I admit that sometimes non typed scenarios are more effective like dynamic types in C# 4.0.

"however, I'm too surprised. Not everyone is good at writing "Software".

Let me clear that. So basically you're saying that Brad Abrams, Nikhil Kothari, Tim Heuer, the guys at the patterns and practices team, the RIA team, the silverlight team, the ADO.NET team (who develop Entity Framework), most developers at Microsoft, and thousands of developers out there who agree on what I wrote above (actually I Agree with them, not the otherway around :D), and prefer n-Tier development with entity model classes and prefer not to use datasets on the presentation tier are not good at writing "Software"? I'm sorry you think so.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Donald) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 03:53:05 +0300

The code for the one data adaptor is fixed. No need to generate schemas as they are generated automatically by the adaptor according to the select statement passed in. We have services on the back end that are called according to a workflow script. These services are written once and well tested. We've done strong type and non-type programming for the last 10 years. Our non-typed solutions wins everytime. Saves time, coding, testing... etc. And it's beautiful. Sorry, to hear you think otherwise... however, I'm too surprised. Not everyone is good at writing "Software".

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Zoltan Arvai) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 17:50:22 +0300

Do you mean that if someone else changes the database? You can't. You can implement polling a service to get your data in periods but that will cause problems if you refresh a datagrid while you are working on it. So I would say after you submit the changes back by hitting a save button, solve any concurrency issues that may occure.

If your datagrid is readonly and you have an acceptable time frame for simulating realtime updates, considering the number of clients and the server's hardver resources, you can poll your domain service.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( x) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:31:08 +0300

Using Silverlight Ria Services, how can I automatically refresh my DataGrid in Silverlight side, if the database changed(eg new elem added)? Is there any easy to use way?

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Zoltan Arvai) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 16:09:12 +0300

Well DataSet is a heavyweight object. You really shouldn't use 1000+ tables in one database, but even if you do, someone will have to generate some code to make it work. Maybe that someone is your VS designer to generate those xsd schemas with all those adapters, it's really ugly. DataSets should stay in the data access layer and never leave the data tier. Binding directly to datasets is just bad practice. Sorry let me rephrase that, in complex scenarios - and by complex scenario I mean applications larger than simple demo applications - you should never use it directly.

Besides serializing a DataSet to a diffgram is just enormous quantity of data.

If you would use non typed datasets... well that not typesafe and binding would be really problematic, not to mention validation issues it would cause with the Silverlight validation framework. Fortunately there is no such object in Silverlight so it saves us from bad practice.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Donald) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 05:46:28 +0300

Heavyweight object? I can have a single dataset, access 1000+ tables without the need to code it... that makes my DataSet object lightweight. If I have to code 1000+ tables then I have a pretty big dll or 1000+ small dlls that I have to manage.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Zoltan Arvai) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 17:31:53 +0300

More and more we prefer to work with in OO manner. The concept of dataset is much closer to the relational world. Plus it's a heavyweight object.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Donald) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 17:21:20 +0300

Should have just implemented DataSets. That would solve the concurrency problem, plus allow me to control the data both on the client and server as I can switch easily between the DataSet object and the xml diffgram.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Zoltan Arvai) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 09:37:41 +0300

Hi Jeff!

I believe RIA Services will be production ready as soos as it goes RTM. I already use it in smaller projects but it definietly has downsides when it comes to performance requirements. WCF Tcp bindings is not available for RIA Service right now but it's built on the WCF platform. The team says later they will support many WCF bindings and configuration.

You cannot say that you dont need the whole product. That is not supported. If you look at the structure you'll see that this would be a problem to implement. But you don't really need it. In a nice architecture you would use DTO-s (Data Transfer Object) and you would send only data back you'd want to work with on client-side. I will definetly write about it in this series.

@JAMBOO

I actually agree with you. However I believe the july preview is considerable stable (of course not over ADO.NET Data Service protocol) I wouldn't use it in preformance critic scenarios yet.

We should not forget that RIA Services is in CTP right now.

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( JAMBOO) — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 02:54:51 +0300

Please consider performance issues we are 9 month in to a RIA nTier app on silverlight and started using .Net Ria Services we had to roll back the full project because of performance problems. the same interfaces are as much as 6 times faster over WCF. YES it is faster to develop and make a very nice RAD platform but I would wait until they get perfomance issues up o speed.

iaburt@nexus-id.com

RE: Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I

( Jeff) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 21:47:25 +0300

Thank you for the overview of RIA Services and showing its place in the n-tier structure. A few questions:

When would you consider RIA Services production ready?
Over the intranet I believe I can use WCF's very fast tcp connections. How does RIA Services compare?
In your example above, when you use LINQ to select from ctx.GetProductsQuery(), it appears that would return all columns from the Product table. How would you go about only selecting particular columns?

Thanks,

Jeff