Microsoft confirmed that it planned to release a new development milestone of .NET RIA Services come next month. According to Dinesh Kulkarni, a program manager in the Application Frameworks Product Unit in the Developer Division, the first version of .NET RIA Services will be available as a Community Technology Preview (CTP) in July 2009. In addition, the final version of the .NET RIA Services is scheduled for release to web in the first half of 2010. Kulkarni emphasized that Microsoft still had a consistent volume of work to get done before v1 of .NET RIA Services would get the RTW green light, but that with the July 2009 CTP the EULA go-live restriction would be scraped.

The CTP is set up to deliver a range of improvements, including “feature enhancements (e.g. code-gen hookpoints to add your custom code, improved library support, better shared code support, query for singletons, cleaner user model and better extensibility support for Application Services etc.). Usual fare of bug fixes, API improvements etc. Enable a first set of better together experiences with ADO.NET Data Services (add a DomainService to Data Service for writing app logic / expose DomainService as DataService),” Kulkarni noted.

The first Bets build of .NET RIA Services will be made available at PDC 2009 in November. With this release, the software giant indicated that it would add new core features, such as hierarchy support and presentation model. In Beta stage the solution will play nice with both Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4.0. in the first part of 2010, as Kulkarni will see the release to web of .NET RIA Services.

“In each CTP, we will be keeping up with corresponding public Silverlight drops as and when they are scheduled (sorry, I don’t have that schedule),” Kulkarni said. “For RTW, we are planning Visual Studio 2010 / .NET 4 as the primary story. Support for previous version TBD (depends on feedback about relative importance / cost / options).”


.NET RIA Services March 2009 Preview is available for download here.