Prism & WCF RIA Services

Back in August I did a post that described how you could use .NET RIA Services and Prism together. That post, and the associated sample app, was based on the .NET RIA Services July CTP.

.NRS –> WRS

A couple of weeks ago at PDC those terribly nice RIA Services chaps released a Beta version, for both Silverlight 3.0 and 4.0. And in time-honored Microsoft tradition, they also changed the name – it now seems to be officially named WCF RIA Services (WRS for short) – to reflect the switch to WCF as the underlying service implementation. You can download the WRS Beta here.

I’ve updated the Prism/WRS sample to work with the Beta drop. You can download it here. The sample targets Silverlight 3.0, WRS Beta and VS 2008. I’m sure with some tweaking it will be relatively easy to get working on Silverlight 4.0 and VS 2010 too. As before, the sample requires the Northwind sample database to be installed and running.

Prism 2.1 –> Prism 4.0

The sample was also updated to use the latest Prism 2.1 release (which you can download here). This is a minor update to the 2.0 (February) release and contains a couple of minor updates in the commanding area. Prism 2.1 was also fully tested against Silverlight 3.0 and against Silverlight 4.0 Beta…

With the release of Silverlight 4.0 Beta, and with VS2010 and .NET 4.0 at Beta 2, we are ramping up our planning for the next major version of Prism. We’re thinking of calling it Prism 4.0 (skipping whole version numbers is another time-honored Microsoft tradition) – so that it lines up with Silverlight 4.0, WPF 4.0 and .NET 4.0!! Planned release date is late spring next year, but as always, once the project is underway we’ll be releasing intermediate drops every two weeks.

I’ll be posting much more on our Prism 4.0 plans in a week or so, but if you have any ideas for what you’d like to see in Prism 4.0 please send them my way…