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Introduction

The last few weeks have been very exciting. At PDC 2009 Microsoft announced WCF RIA Services which is now the official name of .NET RIA Services. Their intention is to emphasize how close RIA Services and WCF is. However there were minor changes to the API it didn’t affect my previous article so you can still consider it valid.

In my last article I wrote about the basic concepts of WCF RIA Services and n-tier development. In this one we’ll talk about the features of WCF RIA Services in terms of creating complex queries.

1. Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I
2. Building N-Tier business applications with WCF RIA Services – Part II

I've been looking at RIA Services for a long time now. I had the lucky pleasure of being given early access to the bits for what was then called "Alexandria". As most readers of this blog have read, I have had some issues with how RIA Services works. In the mean time Brad Abrams and the team have certainly responded and have made changes to the way that RIA Services works and much of it is for the better. I can see pretty simply how you can use RIA Services to build applications that are really architected well, with true separation of concerns. But there is blood in the water.

We walked through end-to-end how to build a Business Application in Silverlight with .NET RIA Services.  We saw the query support, validating update, authorization and personalization as well as all the great new support in VS2010. 

First of all, be careful with the distribution of an object graph, wrong design can affect performance in a way that to much data is passed over the wire.

Some of you likely noticed that my PDC09 demo included a stubbed out Search function that I didn’t really get to walkthrough during the talk. I thought I’d do a blog post showing how it is done.

Building N-Tier business applications with technologies currently in a CTP version (facing WCF RIA Services, formerly .NET RIA Services) could be not the easiest job. One of our recent articles was on this topic (Building N-Tier business applications with .NET RIA Services – Part I) and Ian Burt joined the discussion expressing his thoughts on performance issues. That provoked us to have an interview with him to share his experience and position on that topic.

I made the fairly bold statement at my PDC09 talk that a DomainService IS A WCF Service.  That is, everything you know about a WCF service should be true of a DomainService.  I didn’t have time to get into this in my talk, so I thought I’d hit the highlights here.  And in the process show how to consume a DomainService from a WinForms. 

The biggest problem was when errors occurred during Load() or SubmitChanges(), server-side errors would be silently swallowed unless you opted into the LoadError, LoadedData, and SubmittedChanges events, and explicitly checked for errors.  With the PDC release, we've change this behavior, among others related to error handling.

Well, PDC09 is over and it was a blast.  What a relief it is to finally be able to show the world what the Silverlight team has been working on since Silverlight 3.  Based on the feedback at the conference, people are excited to dig into the new bits and start building solutions. As a round-up of resources from PDC, I’m putting some of my favorites here.