With the new public release of the .NET RIA Services, Microsoft aims to simplify the process associated with building Rich Internet Applications. The Redmond company has made the March 2009 Preview of the .NET RIA Services available for download at the end of the past week. Essentially, the download is meant to deliver a Rapid Application Development (RAD) for RIA, as underlined by Nikhil Kothari, software architect in the .NET Developer Platform group within the Developer Division at Microsoft. Kothari indicated that the need for the .NET RIA Services was generated by the light shed by Silverlight on Rich Internet Applications development difficulties.

“There are too many moving pieces to manually stitch together between the client and the server. There are too many things that are un-natural, yet the norm, starting with the forced n-tier (many developers are used to writing 2-tier apps), async (when sync is the norm), dealing with latency (doing so incorrectly has the potential to break end-user experience), figuring out how to be less chatty, dealing with validation, conflicts, disconnected or occasionally connected scenarios, performing authentication and sharing user state across client and server, the list goes on and on,” Kothari stated.

.NET RIA Services March 2009 Preview is designed to support Windows 7, Windows Server 2008, Windows Vista RTM/SP1 and Windows XP SP3, Microsoft informed. The services manage to bridge ASP.NET and Silverlight together. But at the same time, Microsoft's vision for .NET RIA spans well over ASP.NET and Silverlight to its cloud operating system, Windows Azure. “We wanted to simplify RIA development... and bring back productivity for mainstream development, in much the same way that ASP.NET 1.0 provided client app developers a productive platform for developing Web apps. The pendulum has swung, and it is time to simplify RIA-style client development,” Kothari added.
 
.NET RIA Services March 2009 Preview is available for download here.