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This article is Part 1 of the series WCF RIA Services:

1. Getting Started with WCF RIA Services 
2. Querying Data Through WCF RIA Services
3. Updating Data Through WCF RIA Services
4. WCF RIA Services and MVVM
5. Metadata Classes and Shared Code in WCF RIA Services
6. Validating Data with WCF RIA Services
7. Authenticating and Authorizing Calls in WCF RIA Services
8. Debugging and Testing WCF RIA Services Applications
9. Structuring WCF RIA Services Applications
10. Exposing Additional Domain Service Endpoints for Other Clients

Introduction

In order to build serious business application in Silverlight (and other client technologies), you have to work with a lot of data. And that data is usually not resident on the client machine, it is usually distributed amongst many clients and is stored and operated on by back-end services. If you try to write this kind of application architecture yourself, you have to tackle a lot of technologies and write a lot of plumbing. In the end, most of what you are doing is pushing and pulling data from the client to the back end and invoking operations on the server from the Silverlight client application.