WCF RIA Services Preview for Silverlight 4 Beta Available

 Microsoft has new releases of the RIA Services available for developers targeting Silverlight 3 or the recently released Silverlight 4 Beta. Of course that following the Professional Developers Conference 2009 in Los Angeles last week, Microsoft’s Rich Internet Application Services have been rebranded as WCF RIA Services. The moniker change is designed to illustrate the intimate connection between RIA and Windows Communication Foundation (WCF).

Essentially, The RIA Services framework is set up to implement domain service as WCF services, Microsoft explained. Therefore, the Redmond company changed the framework’s label and is now offering two new Beta development milestones of WCF RIA Services for download, revealed Nicholas Allen, program manager at Microsoft working on Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight, and other projects for the .NET Framework.

“WCF RIA Services simplify building multi-tier applications where the client tier is using Silverlight. WCF RIA Services are able to use all of the features of WCF while reducing the amount of work spent on service configuration, contract specification, data validation, and deployment,” Allen stated.

Developers interested in building Silverlight applications by leveraging WCF RIA Services can now grab the following releases: WCF RIA Services Beta for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 and WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. In addition, there are a few resources which devs can take advantage of, namely PDC sessions. Allen pointed developers to the following content: Building Amazing Business Applications with Microsoft Silverlight and Microsoft .NET RIA Services by Brad Abrams; Mastering Microsoft .NET RIA Services by Dinesh Kulkarni; and Developing REST Applications with the .NET Framework by Henrik Nielsen.

“RIA Services (…) [provide] framework components, tools, and services that make the application logic on the server available to the RIA client without having to manually duplicate that programming logic. You can create a RIA client that is aware of business rules and know that the client is automatically updated with latest middle tier logic every time that the solution is re-compiled,” Microsoft noted.

WCF RIA Services Beta for Visual Studio 2008 SP1 is available for download here.
WCF RIA Services Preview for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 is available for download here.

Silverlight 4 Beta is available for download here.