Deploying WCF RIA Services System Files

WCF RIA Services are not a part of the base framework install. That means that when it's time to move your application from your development machine to some other system you're the one that's responsible for installing the WCF RIA Services system files if they aren't already present. This isn't done automatically for you as part of publishing the application, just the same as if you were using a third-party library. I went looking for the minimum set of steps to publish a WCF RIA Service and found the answer from Tim Heuer.

The method I'd recommend is to run the WCF RIA Services installer on the other machine. You can do this unobtrusively by scripting the installer to run.

msiexec /i RiaServices.msi SERVER=TRUE

This has the benefit of installing the files for everyone to use as well as being robust to any changes in how the components are factored.

If you're not allowed to alter the machine configuration an alternative is to copy the WCF RIA Services libraries to the application bin directory. Here's the list of the assemblies you might be using, courtesy of Tim:

- System.Web.Ria

System.Web.DomainServices.\*  

• Microsoft.RiaServices.Tools