Professional Silverlight® 4

Chapter 8. WCF RIA Services

WHAT'S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Working with entity data models

• Using domain services

• Paging content

• Filtering content

If you are building a business application that needs to move content from servers down to your Silverlight application, WCF RIA Services is going to be one of the most important resources in your arsenal. WCF RIA Services provides your presentation tier with quick and easy access to the services and data that are made available from the middle tier of your larger application.

Many of the developers that are making their way into the Silverlight ranks are from the ASP.NET world, where dealing with logic and data between the tiers was quite a bit simpler. In the ASP.NET world, it was simpler because the presentation tier and the middle tier were usually on the same server, or even in the same co-location. The generated presentation tier, once completed, and after working with the middle tier for any type of logic or data, was then shot down to the client as HTML, JavaScript, and the like. Any further interactions between the client and the middle tier could then be done with a complete page refresh, or using AJAX to make connections to the middle tier in the cloud.

Silverlight brings a more stark separation between the presentation and middle tiers of your application. The code for the application is actually residing on the client. The client then will need to have a means to communicate back to the middle tier for the logic and data that are required. ...