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Shawn Wildermuth has published the first pass of Niagara's Validation DSL.

While Niagara is not going to require that you specify your validation attributes using its DSL, there are some benefits I think we can get by loosely coupling the validation. To that end, i've come up with a very first draft of the DSL to define the attributes. I've decided that instead of being very English-like, to mimic the "M" style of language.

The project wants to help developers add validation support to ADO.NET Data Services as well as Web Services in Silverlight. In addition, it has the goal of allowing multiple ways to supply the validation metadata to the different data access strategies. As it is my opinion that there are scenarios where attributes are not the best idea.

I've been teaching and using ADO.NET Data Services for a long time and I like showing off exposing a LINQ-based provider (Entity Framework, NHibernate or others) to a Silverlight application. While ADO.NET Data Services does expose its API through a REST API, the magic for me is in its use in Silverlight.

If you've never had the chance to visit my sister site (http://www.silverlightdata.com/), now's a good time. I've updated my examples there to include my MVVM, Prism and Declarative UI examples (to go with the skinning/switchable Astoria example).  Take a look if you're doing Silverlight data-based applications.

Over the next few postings, we’ll be working with that Data in five distinct ways:

1. Gather data from the bloggers about themselves, their blog and each entry
2. Store that data in a database
3. Extract that data as needed from the database
4. Transmit the data to a Silverlight application
5. Display the data in a Silverlight application

I was trading tweets today with @pauliom about whether RIA Services would solve some Auth problems he was having out of the browser.  While RIA does do some interesting things with roles/users, I mentioned that typical Forms Auth out of the box should just work.

To that end I have created a simple example of how to protected WCF Services with Forms Auth (works with ADO.NET Data Services as well BTW).  Because I wanted to support it out of the browser as well, I used the new Forms Auth service. 

1. Introduction

In my previous article about ADO.NET data services I showed you how to get a full control under the proxy generation process using T4 templates. But to tell you the truth, I don’t like code generation in all of its forms. Today I am going to show you how to use ADO.NET data services without code generation at all.

Download source code (Requires Silverlight 3 RTM).

Let’s focus on the cloud source of data.  We will use the same sample from the previous parts and change only the data access part to go against ADO.NET Data Services as the data store.