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silverlightsilverlight-4.0wcf-ria-servicescrud

Silverlight 4 Business Application Architecture

With the arrival of VS 2010 and Silverlight 4, I decided it's time to look into Silverlight and understand how to build a 3-Tier business application.

After several hours of searching for and reading documentation and tutorials, I'm thoroughly confused (and that doesn't happen easily).

Here are some specific points I don't understand. I welcome guidance on any of them, and also would appreciate any references to a really good tutorial.

  • Brad Abrahm's What is a .NET RIA services (written for Silverlight 3) seemed very promising, until I realized I don't have System.Web.Ria.dll on my system. Am I missing an optional download? Was this rolled into another DLL for Silverlight 4? Did this go away in favor of something else in Silverlight 4?
  • This recent blog says to start from a Silverlight Business Application, remove unwanted stuff, create a WCF RIA services Class Library project, and copy files and references from the Business Application to the WCF RIA services project, while manually updating resource references (perhaps bug in B2 compiler). Is this really the right road to go down? It seems... clumsy.

My requirements are to perform very simple CRUD on straightforward business objects.

I'm looking forward to suggestions on how to do that the Silverlight 4 way.

Solution

  • I would say that since the silverlight application will be built on top of ASP.NET, the back-end would be the same for the application whether it was Silverlight or Html (WebForms/MVC)

    You could have a look at the CSLA Business Object Framework that includes support for silverlight: http://www.lhotka.net/cslanet/

    Not sure 100% if its support Silverlight 4.0 yet, but if its doesnt I am sure it will soon.