WCF RIA Services RC2 Released

A new development milestone of Windows Communication Foundation RIA Services is now available for download from Microsoft. Earlier this month, the Redmond company offered the second Release Candidate of WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010. In addition to the new RC of WCF RIA Services, early adopters can also grab the April 2010 release of the WCF RIA Services Toolkit. Both can be grabbed from the Microsoft Download Center, according to Nicholas Allen, a program manager at Microsoft working on Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight, and other projects for the .NET Framework.

”RIA Services are an application design pattern that lives between ASP.NET and Silverlight in a multi-tier architecture. Inside RIA Services you can host application logic for data access control, queries, and other data operations. Integration with Silverlight components and controls allows for data validation and access control to automatically be made available to the client,” Allen explained.

Microsoft released its latest generation of development platform and tools to customers recently. Devs have been able to work with the RTM of Visual Studio 2010, .NET Framework 4 and Silverlight 4 since last week.

WCF RIA Services RC2 along with the WCF RIA Services Toolkit April 2010 come at almost a month since the release of the previous RC development milestone for the Services, and the March 2010 version of the Toolkit. “The update from the release candidate at this year’s MIX event includes bug fixes, improvements to tracing and debugging, and some minor feature enhancements. This release candidate also has a corresponding April update to the RIA Services toolkit,” Allen added.

With the WCF RIA Services Toolkit, Microsoft is essentially providing what it calls a collection of forward-looking RIA Services features that comes to complement the normal release cycle.

WCF RIA Services is available for download here.
WCF RIA Services Toolkit April 2010 is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Express is available for download here.

Visual Studio 2010 Premium is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Professional is available for download here.
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate is available for download here.
Visual Studio Test Professional 2010 is available for download here.

.NET Framework 4 RTM is available for download here.

Silverlight 4 Build 4.0.50401.0 RTW is available for download here.