Professional Visual Studio 2012

Chapter 36

WCF RIA Services

WHAT’S IN THIS CHAPTER?

• Understanding WCF RIA Services
• Creating a domain service
• Exposing data
• Consuming WCF RIA Services in Silverlight

In Chapter 32, “Windows Communication Foundation (WCF),” you saw how WCF provided a standardized means of communication in a technology-agnostic manner. WCF RIA Services (commonly referred to as RIA Services) is a layer on top of WCF that provides a prescriptive pattern and framework for designing data-driven applications that consume data from a server. WCF RIA Services currently target Silverlight applications, but with a view to support additional presentation technologies. This chapter looks at how to use RIA Services to create an end-to-end Silverlight application.

GETTING STARTED

RIA Services is currently most closely associated with and focused toward Silverlight for the client platform, so you start by creating a Silverlight project. You can find a Business Application template (as shown in Figure 36-1 under the Silverlight category), which can create all the solution structure required to start with RIA Services (a Silverlight project, an ASP.NET web application, and the RIA Services link between the two).

FIGURE 36-1

This creates a Silverlight project and an ASP.NET project — with the structure of the ASP.NET project shown in Figure 36-2.

FIGURE 36-2

The ASP.NET project already supports and implements ...