RIA Service Base

1. What’s the concept of RIA service?

a. RIA: Rich Internet Application. Web applications that have most of the characteristics of desktop applications, typically delivered by way of standards based web browser plug-ins or independently via sandboxes or virtual machines

b. When evaluating the .NET RIA Services we should be looking at it from two different perspectives. First of all it is a set of design guidelines of how to create a RIA style application. Secondly it is a series of .NET libraries and Visual Studio templates implementing the design guidelines.

2. What can we do with a RIA service application? / Why we need RIA service?

Business applications tend to work with data and other business resources so they are usually built in the standard N tier architecture. If we take a look at this n-tier architecture for the most common type of business resource, the database, we typically see the Create, Read, Update, Delete, (CRUD) pattern appear all the time. While implementing the CRUD pattern in Silverlight isn’t extremely difficult, the very fact that the Silverlight application runs in the browser without direct database access and all server communication is done asynchronously makes this harder than it needs to be. This is exactly one of the problems the .NET RIA Services is trying to solve. Of course there is more to the .NET RIA Services and the standard CRUD operations is just one of the issues addressed. As we will see in this article it addresses much more by including things like data validation, general communication, keeping client and server code synchronized and more.

3. What special features does RIA service have?

a. .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms.

b. It provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations.

c. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

Typical ASP.NET pattern:

New Silverlight or RIA pattern: