Silverlight™ 4 For Dummies®

Chapter 13. Accessing Data with WCF RIA Services

In This Chapter

• Creating the domain data service

• Writing your own Service Methods using LINQ to Entity Framework

• Writing your own Service Methods using LINQ to SQL

• Using WCF RIA Services with WCF Data Services

• Securing your service

• Validating data on the client and server sides

Even though WCF RIA Services is a Community Technical Preview (CTP), it is very well developed and makes building applications that require authentication and database storage much simpler. WCF RIA Services has some excellent support for authenticating users and intercepting processing on the server side as well as for making client-side development easier.

WCF RIA Services is an excellent way to handle all your CRUD operations on a database. WCF RIA Services is more complete than WCF Data Services for use in Silverlight and requires much less work to get working. You no longer have to write code to track the data context, as we cover in Chapter 11; also, authentication is handled very nicely for you, as described in Chapter 12. You can use WCF RIA Services with both LINQ to Entity Framework and LINQ to SQL, in contrast to WCF Data Services, which works only with Entity Framework. You can even use WCF RIA Services against WCF Data Services, which is fantastic if you have to keep your database in a secure network area that's not accessible by the public Internet and you have only Port 80 open.

WCF RIA Services connects Silverlight applications to server-side data stores ...