Today we also shipped the V1 release of WCF RIA
Services. It is included and automatically installed as part of the
Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 setup.
WCF RIA Services makes it much easier to build business
applications with Silverlight. It simplifies the traditional n-tier
application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms
using the power of WCF for communication. WCF 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
authorization based on roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the
client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.
Put simply – it makes it much easier to query data stored on
a server from a client machine, optionally manipulate/modify the data on the
client, and then save it back to the server. It supports a validation
architecture that helps ensure that your data is kept secure and business rules
are applied consistently on both the client and middle-tiers.
WCF RIA Services uses WCF for communication between the
client and the server It supports both an optimized .NET to .NET binary
serialization format, as well as a set of open extensions to the ATOM format
known as ODATA and an optional JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) format that
can be used by any client.
You can hear Nikhil and Dinesh talk a little about WCF RIA
Services in this 13 minutes Channel 9 video.