Last Thursday, we released our RC2 build of RIA Services. You can download all the latest bits from http://silverlight.net/riaservices
These set of bits are compatible with Silverlight 4 RTM and Visual Studio 2010 RTM. I am sure most of you are wondering, why not RTW RIA Services already. Trust me, we would love to release this baby as soon as possible, we are pretty much done. However, we have dependencies on other components. We just need to do the extra bit of testing against these bits to ensure things work fine.
Last week I got to attend DevConnections and was on Channel 9 talking about RIA Services. You can watch it here Watch Ch9 Live on demand!. My RIA Services segment is at the 2hr and 15 min mark. I talk about our dependencies. Also, be sure to check out the RIA Services book club app in the Silverlight 4 launch keynote. Watch the keynote on demand!
I know most of you have been asking what new in this version of RIA Services. As the name suggests this is a Release Candidate 2 and there aren’t any new features. However, this release has tons of bug fixes and community reported issues. Here are some of the the changes (some taken from Dinesh’s Post):-
We would love to hear your feedback so be sure to get back to us via forums, twitter etc.
Cheers
Teched 2010 is almost around the corner. It will be held in New Orleans LA from June 7-10. Details and schedule of talks are now published online. I will be attending the conference this year and will actually be giving two talks. The first one as you must have guessed is on RIA Services. Below are the details
WEB307 | Effective RIA: Tips and Tricks for Building Effective Rich Internet Applications
Maintainability, testability, performance, and security can be improved by understanding the components and tools and following some basic guidelines. This session uses Windows Communication Foundation RIA Services and Microsoft Silverlight as the key tools and covers the separation of concerns between data access, logic and presentation tiers, best practices for testability and tricks for getting better performance through design. We also cover best practices for locking down your application
Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) rely on platforms such as Silverlight and Windows Phone 7 to present data to users in an interesting and interactive manner. With Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) 4, developers can use a unified programming model for accessing services and data in any Microsoft .NET Framework-based application – including RIAs. This session explores how you can leverage your WCF skills along with rich tooling to build distributed services for the RIA. This talk rationalizes the use case for WCF RIA Services, but focuses mostly on innovations in the core WCF feature set. The talk also shows how WCF simplifies talking to web2.0 services like Bing, REST based service. Also, learn how to build a WCF backend service that enables rich and high performance messaging to RIA Clients like a video chat. By the end of this session you will understand some of the powerful architectures available to you for building RIAs with WCF.
At Mix 2010, Nikhil tried something different where he had asked the community of the things they would like to see. I really liked that approach and I am looking to follow a similar idea for my talk.
So, what would you like to see covered? I will definitely try to add it to my demo, if it fits in the overall theme and flow. So please share your thoughts here or email me.
Looking forward to seeing all of you at Teched in the Big Easy and looking to hear your thoughts on the talk and things you would like to see.
Cheers!!