Learning about WCF/Silverlight and WCF RIA Services via videos

Some folks prefer videos to text material. Others find them complementary. Either way, here are some videos about WCF and WCF RIA Services in Silverlight. I am sure there are more created by community – feel free to add links. Many, if not most of the videos are based on extensive preparation and so they are a bit more tailored for learning than a run of the mille blog post.

Short intro from Silverlight 4 launch

http://www.microsoft.com/silverlight/silverlight-4-launch/

Scott Guthrie’s keynote. A short ten minute intro to RIA Services with client emphasis is from 28:00 onwards

Silverlight TV / Channel 9 episodes

Silverlight TV 46: What's Wrong with my WCF Service?

Yavor walks through verification and troubleshooting steps for accessing a WCF service form Silverlight.

Silverlight TV 34: Duplex Communication with WCF in Silverlight 4

Tomek covers duplex communication in WCF – Silverlight using a chat application example.

Silverlight TV 51: Debugging and Deploying WCF RIA Services

Saurabh covers the steps to address the common support issue of RIA app deployment.

Silverlight TV 44: Top Four Questions from the WCF RIA Services Forum:

Deepesh covers top questions including POCO, client-side computed properties, access control and Windows auth

Silverlight TV 41: Top Tips for WCF RIA Services

Dinesh covers POCO, code-gen rules, association and composition, using nhibernate etc

Silverlight TV 26: Exposing SOAP OData and JSON Endpoints for RIA Services

Deepesh covers the use of SOAP/JSON endpoints for other clients including Windows Phone 7 client. Also covers use of OData endpoint with Excel.

Siverlight TV 52: Entity Level Validation. Defining metadata and nested combo-boxes with WCF RIA Services

Kyle covers validation in depeth

Silverlight TV 28: WCF RIA Services v1.0 Launch!

Nikhil and Dinesh about RIA Services evolution, purpose, favorite features etc

Silverlight TV 20: Community Driven Development with WCF RIA Services

John Papa talks to Jeff Handley about how community is involved in WCF RIA Services

Pete at Microsoft: WCF RIA Services Team Interview

Jeff, Dinesh, Deepesh talk about how RIA Services V1 was developed. What it is about etc.

Jeff Handley on WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4

How RIA Services component is developed, validation etc.

  

Full conference talks

Effective RIA: Tips and Tricks for Building Effective Rich Internet Applications

Deepesh shares a comprehensive list of tips at TechEd 2010

Accessing Web Services in Microsoft Silverlight

Yavor’s in-depth look at WCF/Silverlight

Developing with WCF RIA Services Quickly and Effectively

Nikhil shows how to build a RIA Services app the right way without sweat at MIX 2010

Nikhil Kothari - LOB Application Development with Silverlight 4

Nikhil’s JAOO talk about RIA Services – Sept 2010

Two part coverage of WCF RIA Services at PDC 2009

Building Amazing Business Apps with Silverlight and WCF RIA Services

Introductory talk by Brad Abrams – covers overview, drag drop experience and overall productivity

Mastering WCF RIA Services

Dinesh provides an under-the-hood look at how RIA Services works and also covers key tips for building effective RIA applications

Training / external videos

Silverlight 4 Business Apps: Module 2 – Event Manager using WCF RIA Services

TechDays 2010 : Building business data-driven applications FAST with WCF RIA Services and Silverlight

Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Firestarter (Part 4 of 5): WCF Made Easy, Data & RIA Services

Complex types in RIA Services: base types or entities?

When we designed complex types for WCF RIA Services V1 SP1, we had a hot debate. Are complex types like base types or entities? Well, they are a bit of both.

They are like base types in the sense:

1. They are structured values; not objects with identity
2. They can be used for entity members or DomainService method parameters
3. There is no inheritance or association (inbound or outbound) support

They are like entities in the sense

1. They are code-gen'ed
2. They are deeply change tracked, validated (with error reporting) when used in an entity

They are definitely not intended to be substituted for entities. They are not meant to replace composition where the composed object is an entity.

Samples of intended use:
Customer.Address where address does not have an identity of its own
Shape.Coordinate where coordinate is used like a value (no associations etc)

Samples of unintended use:
In place of composition -
Order.OrderDetail // OrderDetail if captured in a separate relational entity likely has its own ID and associations
For many-to-many link entity/table
Course.Registration or Student.Registration // another entity with its ID

In this round, we didn't really get a chance to provide a mechanism to use a complex types like a base-type - with essentially a portable assembly across Silverlight and .NET. That was a scoping decision based on priority feedback from a few MVPs we regularly talk to.

For more about the feature use and all the bells and whistles see Mathew's detailed blog post.

What is your scenario for complex types? Do the beta bits releases at PDC work well for your scenarios?

Thanks.
Dinesh

Journey from RIA Services V1 to V1 SP1 Beta

Finally on the eve of PDC 2010, we get to share our latest bits with the community. Jeff has done a great job of covering the details of what's in so I won't repeat that here. Just check his latest post for that and also Tomek's posts that cover a broader vista of WCF technologies on tap for PDC. Instead, I will briefly cover how it shaped up.

Like many other V1s, WCF RIA Services V1 was done under intense time pressure and locked to Silverlight 4 Tools schedule. In hindsight too, that was the right thing to do as it allowed us to get a reasonably feature-full and capable package in users' hands. The response was very gratifying and on occasions, I was pleasantly surprised by what folks in the community were able to build with our bits. We as a team were also glad to see strong community involvement - when folks showed appreciation and when those in the know took us to task for missing capabilities or plain bugs or missing info (sadly most frequent of the three). There were many who spent so many of their hours advising us - Colin Blair, David Yack, Ben Hayat, Fredrik Normen, Dan Wahlin, Bill Burrows, Billy Hollis and many others outside Microsoft. Equally impressive were those who weren't directly on the product team but every bit a part of it with their contributions - John Papa, Pete Brown, Tim Heuer and many others.

SP1 is our attempt to give back to the community with a relatively quick turnaround - in about 5 months. Typically Service Packs (SP) are all about bug fixes and related quality improvements. This one is a bit more than that.

There were clear baseline capabilities that we wanted to cover in V1 but just couldn't. That was the price to pay for shipping - I guess well worth it. But we wanted to cover those soon. First came the bugs that had to be postponed because they didn't meet the high bar while locking down V1 RTW. So did a bunch of infrastructure and test improvements to make us more efficient and pay down debt. Then we were able to get to key items like "shared entities", complex types, ICollectionViewFactory and T4.

For this post, I will just briefly talk about shared entities - not being able to share the same entity type (say Employee) across two different DomainService types (say PurchaseOrderService and EmployeeInfoService) was a problem for those building apps with multiple DomainServices. Data models often have "spiders". The entity at the center of the spider is often involved in multiple submodels. The object model simply reflects that. Now you can do that without resorting to workarounds.

Doing that feature required some intense discussions about the approaches - each DomainService gets to "shape" the code-gen'ed entity in the client project. Do we take the intersection or the union? If one DomainService adds a named update method, how do you deal with the corresponding member on the entity in a different DomainService? What about associations that are different in the two DomainServices? After huddling with our "advisors" from the community, we settled on the union approach and the feature was on track. The usual design, implement, stabilize, meet all quality gates were done and we were close to PDC lockdown date.

Such was the journey. Maybe I will cover some bugs in the next installment. If you would like to see anything specific covered, please let me know about that as well.

Until then, please try the bits and keep the feedback flowing - on forums, blogs, twitter ...

First post since move

Here is the starter post to wave my flag. My previous blog entries were at
http://blogs.msdn.com/dinesh.kulkarni

Briefly, I have worked on LINQ / C# and WCF RIA Services.