Silverlight™ 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 12. Using WCF RIA Services in Silverlight

In This Chapter

• Getting Started with WCF RIA Services

• Authenticating your users

• Creating a custom authentication system

WCF RIA Services is a new framework from Microsoft that you can use to easily build Silverlight applications that require users to log in to access data. In fact, although we cover WCF Data Services in Chapter 11, WCF RIA Services makes the same tasks much easier to accomplish.

RIA stands for Rich Internet Application, which, of course, is what a Silverlight application is. WCF RIA Services uses some "magic" in Visual Studio to generate files in both the server side of your application and the client side. This bit of magic makes it much faster to build your application and perform validation because you need to implement validation only once to have it executed on both the client and the server. WCF RIA Services uses the ideas of context and entities similarly to how WCF Data Services uses them.

In this chapter, we show you how to use WCF RIA Services to authenticate your users easily, and you create a custom authentication system as an example of how you might implement some custom logic when a user logs in to your site.

Getting Started with WCF RIA Services

Microsoft WCF RIA Services is installed as part of the Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010. When you create a new Silverlight application with these tools installed, some new templates show up, including the Silverlight Business Application template and the ...