Getting Started with .Net RIA Services

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I believe that the .Net RIA Services is to ASP.Net what ASP.Net was ASP pages. It really is a great and bold move from Microsoft and represents the future in business oriented applications.

Announced at MIX 09, .Net RIA Services showed how it’s possible to have a concrete, End-to-End, Application Pattern to build business oriented applications without have to deal with all the fuss and the piping required today to build a Rich Internet application.

You can think of it as RAD for RIA.

RIA Services can pretty much hook up to any back end:

• Databases through ADO.Net (LINQ to SQL, Entity Framework, …)
• POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects)
• Services (Rest, SOAP, …)

An application logic layer called a Domain Service Class is then generated that would handle the CRUD (Create, Retrieve, Update, Delete) and custom operations logic. You can think of this as your business layer in an n-tier architecture.

How it Works Overview – Really Easy

As I would like to make this a multi part post I would just give a brief overview of how to get started and talk in more details of the other features in upcoming posts.

After installing all the required components (see end of post for links) you start with a regular ASP.Net Application Project and a Silverlight client that you link to the ASP.Net project.

Now you can create the Domain Service Class that would represent your application logic

Select the DataContexts/ObjectContexts available.

Now all the methods that you created on the server side in the ASP.Net application would be available through a proxy class that was generated in the Silverlight application as shown in the screen shot bellow.

And can be used as a datasource for a Form, Grid… in the Silverlight application.

Pretty cool isn’t it?

.Net RIA services comes with a sleuth of features and that’s just the preview. I am really excited about what we would be able to achieve with this new framework.

What you need

Visual Studio 2008 SP1

Silverlight 3 Beta

.NET RIA Services March ‘09 Preview

Other Interesting Articles on .Net RIA Services

What is .NET RIA Services?

.NET RIA Services: From Vision to Architecture

Mix 09 .Net RIA Services Videos

Building Amazing Business Centric Applications with Microsoft Silverlight 3

.NET RIA Services - Building Data-Driven Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft ASP.NET

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Hope this was helpful!

Hatim