Starting with .NET RIA Services.

Tags: | Categories: Blog Posted by admin on 8/27/2009 6:43 PM | Comments (3)

For the past year I have been posting about .NET RIA Services and encouraging Silverlight developers to get started early in this framework for the Enterprise.

What’s is .NET RIA Services?

In very simple words is the complete story from Microsoft to bring ASP.NET and Silverlight and take advantage of the best of both worlds. Use each technology for what does best. As well as use patterns to write your solutions. For example, use ASP.NET for Authentication instead of Silverlight, yet Silverlight will take advantage of the security from ASP.NET. And MVC pattern for Silverlight as well not just ASP.NET.

Where do I start?

I would as a developer always start by getting my hands dirty, download the sample solution and look around the moving parts. The latest was posted by Microsoft on July 2009, still is not the release version yet I would recommend to start learning now. In the same page you can download the overview documentation for .NET RIA Services.

Where is the architecture graphic?

You cannot explain technology concepts anymore without a power point presentation or a great chart, so here is “the graphic”

From their Microsoft RIA Service Overview I “borrowed” “the graphic”

image

System Requirements

Windows 7; Windows Server 2003; Windows Server 2008; Windows Vista; Windows XP Service Pack 3

Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Web Developer Express 2008 SP1.

After the installation you’ll be able to select an option to Enable .NET RIA Services in Visual Studio 2008 SP 1

image

Make sure to check the box to start your solutions, by default the checkbox isn’t check.

If you have already a Silverlight solution that you would like to convert, you can do so by going to the projects properties, select the Silverlight and change the dropdown .NET RIA Services

image

From here is all making sure you can consume your data from the database and is easy to follow the pattern to display it in Silverlight.

How to share code between ASP.NET and Silverlight.

Generates a proxy file between ASP.NET and Silverlight from the Web Project to the Silverlight one, to be able to call the methods with transparency using attributes like EnableClientAccess will created for you without having to create a Web Service.

Summary

This is an opportunity for developers to start with a solution that will give you your server side and you client side communication for your enterprise solution in a clear and simple pattern for you to follow.

Cheers

Al

Comments

on 8/30/2009 10:24 AM

Pingback from Twitter Trackbacks for Starting with .NET RIA Services. : Al Pascual [alpascual.com] on Topsy.com


on 9/2/2009 6:21 PM

If you haven’t please read part 1 before reading this post. The most powerful thing about .NET RIA Services


on 10/15/2009 1:48 AM

I'm a big fan of REST (you can find an article on this site that I did about creating RESTful services in ASP.NET). WCF is now supporting REST which makes it easier to do in .NET. However, I still prefer Web Services for most business applications because of the WSDL file. Having a specification in a standard language does limit your options in Web Services compared to REST but I think that the improved control is critical to creating interoperable business applications.

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