RIA Services Deep Dive with Matt Duffield
Silverlight 3 has come a long way in supporting the building rich client-side applications. It takes a little while to get your head around the asynchronous programming model in Silverlight but once you get past the paradigm, the user experience becomes richer for your clients. Part of the attraction to Silverlight development is its broad reach and multi-platform appeal. Change tracking and database persistence was quite cumbersome and difficult with plain old Web Services or WCF. It became a little better with ADO.NET Data Services but it has reached its best appeal with RIA Services. We will take a look at what RIA Services has to offer and its flexibility and power with working with Silverlight. We will look into the metadata buddy class that gets generated and understand how validation works. We will utilize controls that natively know how to use RIA Services asynchronously. We will look into hooking custom logic into every service call for custom business logic and other cross cutting concerns. We will evaluate some of its conventions over configuration and then dive into what are some best practices when creating an enterprise solution.