RIA Services Link Listing #1

A number of WCF RIA Services team members are starting to blog about RIA services features introduced in the bits we handed out at PDC09. It is also great to see other folks working with the bits and sharing their experiences over blogs and twitter. Here is a list of some of the new posts in the last week or so that I found interesting:

Data Access in DomainServices

• POCO Types and Associations: Yauhen Safrankou describes the use of the [Association] attributes when you create your own POCO types. RIA Services is designed around vanilla CLR types, so you can plug in several DAL technologies, including your own types.
• Amazon S3 with RIA Services: speaking of broad DAL support, Mark Woodhall blogs about a sample of access buckets and objects in the S3 store in a DomainService.
• Entity Framework v2 and RIA Services: EF has many great improvements in v2, making it suitable for n-tier development, and [http://blogs.msdn.com/digital_ruminations] Mathew Charles describes some things you want to keep in mind when building your data models.

DomainService Patterns

• DomainService Error Handling: Mathew describes how RIA Services honors the ASP.NET CustomErrors feature to prevent sending errors and sensitive information to clients across the trust boundary and how you can centralizing error processing and logging on the middle-tier.
• Composition Support in RIA Services: Mathew has been busy blogging about new features. This one discusses our feature for handling classic scenarios like Orders-OrderDetails (and similar aggregate scenarios). And yes, the feature works for hierarchies that go beyond two entity types.
• Presentation Model in RIA Services: Deepesh Mohnani describes another new feature that allows you to craft up your own DTOs or presentation tier types for exposing from the middle tier instead of exposing DAL types directly. RIA Services allows you to use your types in both read-only and read-write scenarios.
• WCF in WCF RIA Services: Saurabh describes what is behind the name change for the product. RIA Services still provides simplicity and a prescriptive model, still takes care of default services infrastructure, but also brings the full flexibility and power of WCF when you need to dive to take control.

What is in the works? (sneak peek at what is coming)

• Silverlight 4, Async Validation and INotifyDataErrorInfo: Fredrick Normen describes using a very important addition to Silverlight 4: an enhanced IDataErrorInfo. Now that this is in Silverlight, we’ll be adding support for this on the Entity class so you get an out-of-box exception-less validation story that automatically supports displaying and tracking both errors raised on the client as well as async errors raised on the server without requiring you to write infrastructure code. Something to look forward to…

If you're new to RIA Services, stop by the official landing page, which has install links, and intro videos.

If you have a RIA Services related link to share, feel free to send me a note via my contact form. This quick post was to get the series started; I am hoping to make this link listing a weekly thing, to share what I find interesting around RIA Services.

I’m also on twitter where I share updates much more often. You can follow me via @nikhilk.