NET RIA Services: Building Data-Driven Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight3 and Microsoft ASP.NET

RIA_Services

Thanks to everyone who came out to hear my presentation at the South Florida Architects meeting last night. Here is a link to my presentation and the cool demos:  https://cid-e80ea9288abd4452.skydrive.live.com/browse.aspx/RIA%7C_Services

To quickly re-cap, Microsoft .NET RIA Services (aka "Alexandria") simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms.

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

I'm personally excited about what this framework has to offer and how it elegantly solves some of the major issues that have plagued most software developers and architects over the years when they sit down to design and develop a distributed web "business" application. 

Designing a rock-solid, "data-centric", N-Tier web application is tough - especially when you throw in the ability to handle off-line scenarios...the capabilities exposed by the .NET RIA Services framework looks very promising as a reusable  framework and pattern that should really increase developer productivity and shorten application delivery cycles.

To get started, I *highly recommend* checking out the 2 MIX sessions / blog posts below by Brad Abrams and Nikhil Kothari...if you develop RIA applications for a living - it will be the best 150 minutes you have ever spent!

Brad Abrams’ MIX09 Session:
https://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T40F
https://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/17/mix09-building-amazing-business-applications-with-silverlight-3.aspx

Nikhil Kothari’s MIX09 Session:
https://videos.visitmix.com/MIX09/T41F
https://www.nikhilk.net/NET-RIA-Services-Vision-Architecture.aspx

Technorati Tags: NET RIA Services,Silverlight3