Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Index

With Silverlight 4 and RIA Services all-but done, I thought it would be worthwhile to highlight some of the key features of the platform and tools that make Silverlight a fantastic platform for building business applications.    I’ll avoid gratuitous video and dancing hippos and focus on just the bread and butter of business applications:  Querying, Updating, Validating and securing your important business-data.  I’ll also use this to refresh a few of the posts from my Silverlight 3 era series.   

The walk through requires:

You can download the completed application.  

I authored this with Silverlight 4 RC, but I fully expect it to work with Silverlight 4 RTM. 

  1. Starting a New Project with the Business Application Template 
  2. Exposing Data from Entity Framework 
  3. Consuming Data in the Client
  4. Updating Data
  5. Validating Data
  6. Authentication and Personalization
  7. Silverlight and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
  8. Exposing OData Services
  9. Exposing WCF (WSDL) Services
  10. Exposing JSON Endpoint
  11. Working with Reference Data - In Progress
  12. Deploying to a 3rd Party Hoster (I could not do any better than Saurabh's post!)
  13. Workflow Integration - In Progress
  14. Management with AppFabric - In Progress
  15. Debugging Tips and Tricks - In Progress
  16. Globalized and Localized 

Comments

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2010
    We have learned a lot from your posts, but still crave for more ;-) Could you include SQL Azure, asp.net authentication and federation using live-id? Great posts, Brad, keep going on!

  • Anonymous
    March 15, 2010
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    March 16, 2010
    Aaron, At AXEO, we generally use the concepts here for RAD projects and MVVM for final release.

  • Anonymous
    March 17, 2010
    You are great as usual...I would be very very obliged....if u give more examples with respect to using Stored Procedures with RIA in silverlight 4 as well...(if there are any changes at all)...if not Silverlight 3's tutorial with respect to SPs was great enough

  • Anonymous
    March 20, 2010
    Aaron, Not sure if you are still monitoring this thread.  If so, could we trouble you to send (info at axeo . com) small samples showing the problems listed in your post above.

  • Anonymous
    March 24, 2010
    Hi Brad, could you take a look at my blog, I had the same problems as Aaron Cheers, Sergey [sergey.klementiev at readify.net]

  • Anonymous
    March 25, 2010
    Having considered numerous platforms over the years its been my experience that very often handling of composite relationships and foreign keys are where things get interesting with truly elegant solutions found in the most unexpected of places. I'll be very interested to follow this discussion with WCF RIA Services. Interestingly I was watching Nikhil's mix talk today and note that he applied MVVM and WCF RIA services together (in an albeit straight forward demo), yet comments here reflect them as mutually exclusive. I'll checkout Sergey's blog, I'm interested to see what the percieved barriers are here.

  • Anonymous
    March 26, 2010
    I read your post on RIA & POCO and looking forward to any SL4 updates. I'm wondering if there is a way to get a polymorphic projection of POCO objects to the client. Basically I want to create something like an Employee base class (or even IEmployee) and subclasses SuperEmployee and SlackerEmployee on the server. I want the projection to honor the class inheritance or interface implementation so I can return and handle a list of polymorphic types. Can I get RIA to project this class hierarchy?

  • Anonymous
    March 28, 2010
    I found the answer to my question. You get the compiler to project the inheritance tree by annotating the server classes. Just tell the base class about the derived types... [KnownType(typeof(SuperEmployee))] public partial class Employee {   ... } http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ee707366%28VS.91%29.aspx

  • Anonymous
    April 02, 2010
    Hi Brad, Great series!  I am really looking forward to the release of all the new toys in a little over a week, but I am currently still using the PDC Preview Release and ran into a few issues when trying to use the Domain Services from within an ASP.NET MVC 2 application. I blogged about my solution to the problems I was having, but was wondering if there was any improvement in the RC or upcoming final release? Please read about my workaround and let me know what your thoughts are.  Thank you! http://blog.bmdiaz.com/archive/2010/04/03/using-ria-domainservices-with-asp.net-and-mvc-2.aspx Regards, Bobby

  • Anonymous
    April 21, 2010
    Now that Brad has left would this series carry on?