RIA Services

RIA Services is a framework that simplifies the process of building enterprise applications on the Silverlight platform. It makes it easy for a Silverlight client to query data on a server (from a database or other data store) and for the client to create, edit, and delete the data. RIA Services also provides additional features such as allowing validation rules to be defined that are run at both server side and client side.

RIA Services is composed of a few components:

• Entities that are to be shared between server and client (in this chapter, these will be generated automatically by Entity Framework)

• Entity metadata allows additional validation rules to be attached to entities and also specifies which data should be serialized

• Domain service exposes methods that the client can invoke to query data or to submit changes to entities (create, edit, or delete)

This chapter will use SQL Azure as the source of data as it is the typical scenario seen in enterprise software. Other...