.NET RIA Services Resources (for March 2009 Preview)

Some of it is covered in my previous post and on Silverlight.net but here is a summary:

  1. Bits (prereq: Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Silverlight 3 beta tools for VS): RIA Services March Preview (unveiled last week at MIX)
  2. Documentation / video
    1. A PDF file with an intro and quick starts is here
    2. If you have an hour or so, you could try the walkthrough in the RIA Services March Preview MSI
  3. MIX talks - videos
    1. RIA Services + Client Overview (BradA)
    2. RIA Services Deep Dive (NikhilKo)
  4. Samples: https://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices
  5. Questions, comments, bug reports, feedback: .NET RIA Services Forum

 

Common questions and quick answers:

How is this related to ADO.NET Data Services (Astoria)?
We have a plan to give you the best of both the worlds in forthcoming CTPs. You can see slide #19 in Pablo's talk for an outline. (The March preview does not use Astoria)

Do I have to use LINQ to SQL or EF?
No you do not. You can just use DomainService base class. In fact when you access web services or XML file or some other non-ORM source, it makes sense to just write your class to derive from DomainService. For other ORMs, we are working with a few community members to get provider stories worked out. We also hope to publish a provider sample to help out.

Do I have to use Silverlight?
No you don't have to (though I hope you at least try it out). While we have a great story with Silverlight beta, you could also use RIA Services in a web app with a few early preview bits of ASP.NET DomainDataSource. There is also an SEO story. In future, we hope to bring you AJAX, publishing as a web service etc.

What is the Silverlight 3.0 RTM story?
We are planning to release an updated CTP in the Silverlight 3.0 RTM timeframe to integrate with Silverlight 3.0. We would like to release go-live CTPs later in the year before an RTW (date TBD).

Are you feature-complete? Are there more goodies coming?
There is more stuff to come. So send you feedback in - on forum or one of the team member blogs. So fire away.

What features are you considering?
That is a good topic for future blog/forum posts. I have to think about getting the candidate feature list in a reasonable shape with good description so you can give some feedback.

I tried running this on <blah> with <foo> turned on and <bar> off and <baz> showed up? Is this expected?
You bet that's by design :-). That aside, this sounds like a great question to ask on the forum where people are trying out all kinds of things way beyond the capability and imagination of the little team that built RIA Services preview (and certainly beyond my very limited knowledge).