Silverlight 3 + .NET RIA Services July Preview
Silverlight 3 is here!!! The Silverlight platform has come a long way (in a relatively short period of time) from a scriptable graphics and media runtime into a full-fledged platform for developing Rich Internet Applications, using managed code, the goodness of application frameworks and controls, and great tools such as Visual Studio and Expression. In my MIX ’09 post, I listed the following:
- Graphics and Media Capabilities - GPU support, perspective transforms, pixel shader effects, media smooth streaming, new codecs, including ability to write your own, better text rendering, etc.
- Data - Lots of new data controls (such as DataForm), data-binding improvements, and validation.
- Application model - ability to use library cache for reducing xap package sizes, better styling and theming capabilities and support for application frameworks.
- Out-of-browser applications - the ability to write apps that escape the browser chrome, can run offline, and across platforms.
- Networking - besides offline/online notifications, support for binary serialization, server push and local connections (for communication across silverlight apps)
Today, all that becomes real, and available for apps to use and deploy with Silverlight 3. An exciting summer lies ahead for RIA development. Here are some interesting Silverlight feature highlight demos along with a list of all the new features.
In addition, I am also working on .NET RIA Services, which is all about making typical LOB apps, and n-tier data-driven Silverlight applications much easier to build by harnessing the strengths of Silverlight on the client and ASP.NET on the server. Here is my post on the .NET RIA Services vision and high-level architecture. The July ’09 Preview has also been released, and while this obviously includes the updates to work on top of Silverlight 3 and various bug fixes, it also includes other significant feature updates. For example:
API improvements:
- Improved DomainContext API - much more easier to issue multiple queries simultaneously, track completion, cancel requests etc. using callbacks. Also you can now see consistency with what you authored on the server DomainService (aka no more Get -> Load renaming). Yes, we heard your feedback!
- Consistent pattern for authoring CRUD operations in the DomainService on the server.
Some new capabilities:
- Extensibility around authentication model on the client - for example, to plug in OpenID. There are other extensibility hooks for framework authors and app authors also included in various parts of the stack on the server and on the client.
- Ability to create n-tier class libraries. You can now have a server Class Library to put your DomainService in, link it to a Silverlight Class Library, and then reference the pair across multiple apps.
- Initial bits of integration with ADO.NET Data Services. For example, you can now expose an explicit service by layering a DataService on top of DomainService.
Some big time cleanup:
- Fixed the shared code model. Just put something in a .shared.cs (or .shared.vb) file, and we understand it. No need for adding the confusing [Shared] metadata attribute… in fact the attribute is simply gone!
- Updated our code-gen to support additional partial class scenarios much more straight-forwardly such as computed properties, custom initialization logic etc.
I’ll be building an end-to-end app with .NET RIA Services that goes beyond the basic HelloWorld sample. I hope to share in the next couple of weeks over the course of a set of posts. Also look for a post on Silverlight.FX (soon), which has been updated to run and even take advantage of a couple of Silverlight 3 features.