WCF RIA SERVICES & TELERIK

What does support for WCF RIA Services mean for RadControls for Silverlight?

We see a great future in WCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) and believe that it will be a major step for the Silverlight platform towards supporting line of business scenarios.  RIA Services simplifies the building of n-tier Rich Internet Applications by using best-practice patterns to automate n-tier application design. It transparently enables developers to share a single business layer between tiers, eliminating the often tedious and manual task of linking server and client application tiers. Telerik RadControls for Silverlight fully support binding to WCF RIA services.

When you use RadControls for Silverlight with WCF RIA Services (formerly .NET RIA Services) you get:

• Completely codeless binding to WCF RIA Services
• Simple access to server-side data
• Impressive validation support on the client and on the server
• Patterns for dealing with common Line of Business scenarios
• Automatic data paging by using the pager control
• Easy re-use the ASP.NET authorization and authentication
• Faster server-side sorting, filtering and paging for all data

What are WCF RIA Services?

Microsoft WCF RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the server and client platforms. RIA Services provides a framework that enables a developer to write logic that runs on the server and that can easily be consumed by client applications. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating client platforms, such as Silverlight, with server-side components, like ASP.NET’s Membership system. You can think of RIA services as a more perceptive layer on top of ADO.NET Data Services.

How Telerik RadControls for Silverlight consume RIA Services?

All data-bound Telerik Silverlight  controls support binding to WCF RIA Services via DomainDataSource. With completely codeless binding, it takes almost no extra effort to bind RadControls for Silverlight 3 to RIA Services.

The control that benefits the most from using WCF RIA Services is RadGridView for Silverlight, which now can handle an enormous amount of records server-side in no time. All data operations are executed on the server, which results in speedier sorting, filtering and paging. Telerik Silverlight Grid can be directly bound to a RIA Service through its ItemSource property, or to a Silverlight DomainDataSource contol. Either way, no coding is required, as both approaches allow you to declaratively set the RIA Service. Read more about RadGridView support for DomainDataSource.

All Telerik Silverlight  input controls support metadata-driven validation via data annotations. You can use RadControls for Silverlight  with the Validation Summary class, and all input controls implement the automatic validation UI provided by the platform. Server-side validation attributes are also supported.

Blog Posts on WCF RIA Services

Getting started with WCF RIA Services

Integrating Silverlight Data Visualization controls with WCF RIA Services

Server sorting and filtering with WCF RIA Services and Telerik Data Virtualization for Silverlight

Master-Details with RadGridView for Silverlight 4, WCF RIA Services RC2 and Entity Framework 4.0

RadGridView for Silverlight and WCF RIA Services Part 1: Asynchronous Master-Details Views

RadGridView for Silverlight and WCF RIA Services Part 2: Basic Editing Support

Self-Paced Learning Guide for RadControls for Silverlight