In this thrilling conclusion to my series on unit testing, I’ll show you how to use the DomainServiceTestHost to test your DomainServices. In parts one and two I showed you how to extract external dependencies using the IDomainServiceFactory and how to...

This is part two in a series I’m writing about how to unit test your DomainServices. In part one, I discuss how you could use an IDomainServiceFactory to factor external dependencies out of your code.  Continuing along the same lines of thinking...

I’ve always been a proponent of driving product quality through unit testing. Regardless of the specific testing methodology, I enjoy the confidence a rich suite of tests can bring to product and application development. For WCF RIA developers, I wanted...

If you’ve been using RIA in the cloud or are considering it, it is definitely worth your time to take a look at the Windows Azure AppFabric June CTP . The CTP is an early look at a platform that is positioned to simplify the development, deployment, and...

The question I’ve been fielding most lately is how to write a custom CollectionViewLoader . Once you see it done, it’s a pretty simple task. Without an example it’s hard to know where to start. In a previous post, I discussed how the view, loader, and...

I need to ask a favor of all my regular readers out there (*crickets*). I often hear stories along the lines of “I use the DomainService Wizard to generate my DomainService. Then I make tiny changes to the generated code or metadata and may move it or...

At the Silverlight Firestarter ‘10 , John Papa did a great talk on MVVM Patterns for Silverlight and WP7 that featured WCF RIA Services as the data layer. For that talk, I helped him streamline the service layer abstraction to correctly work with the...

To correspond to the new RIA Services build we’ve released at Mix, I’ve made some updates to the DomainCollectionView . I updated select API, fixed a few bugs, and updated the sample as well. If you’re not familiar with the DCV , here’s my original post...

The other day someone asked me how to get a ComboBox working with enums and validation. It turned out to be more tricky than I had anticipated ( there’s a common theme here… ) so I figured I’d put together a quick post on it. Stumbling Points This section...

One of the most common tasks when developing a RIA Services application binding to a collection of data. There are some declarative options that include binding directly to your DomainContext or DomainDataSource . These options are great for spinning...

[This sample references out-of-date API. This newer post discusses the updates made for the V1 SP2 Preview and shows how to implement filtering.] There’ve been plenty of talk about an MVVM-friendly DomainDataSource . I’m pretty sure it means completely...

Windows Azure Table storage has minimal support for LINQ queries. They support a few key operations, but a majority of the operators are unsupported. For RIA developers used to Entity Framework development, this is a significant difference. I wanted to...

There are three primary strategies when it comes to partitioning entities across Windows Azure Table Storage. You can: Put everything in the same partition Put everything in different partitions Put things in two or more specific partitions A full discussion...

For this post, I’ll assume you read my intro to Windows Azure Table Storage . If not, take a second to read it. This time around I’m skipping past the contextualizing. In my first entry, I showed how to get a simple entity all the way from Table Storage...

John and I went through four questions we see frequently on the WCF RIA Services forum . Here’s our episode and some notes to go along with it. Silverlight TV: Episode 52 How do I investigate exceptions thrown from my DomainContext? If you’ve been using...

My teammate, Jason Cooke, put together this great article on changing the timeout in RIA Services. Hope you find it helpful. Change Timeouts for WCF RIA Services WCF RIA Services specifies default timeouts for its endpoints, so you can be sure that all...

I’ve been excited about this CTP for quite a while now and it’s great to finally have a chance to play with it. Way back in early RIA days we had a number of conversations with the TPL (Task Parallel Library) folks to see if we could use Task<T>...

I’ve wanted to do a follow up to my original ComboBox post for a while now. I answered a number of the questions throughout the comments, but I thought I’d gather all the answers up and add some nice code samples. Hope this helps. How do I use a ComboBox...

We worked right up to the deadline, but I’m happy to say we got a preview of RIA support for Windows Azure Table Storage into the October Toolkit release (that coincides with the SP1 Beta release ). You could integrate with table storage previously, but...

For our WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta release we were finally able to improve binding support for EntitySets and EntityCollections . In our V1 release, EntitySet and EntityCollection did not support adding and removing entities through the IEditableCollectionView...

WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta along with WCF RIA Services October toolkit are now both available and ready to go live. You can download them from http://silverlight.net/riaservices . Check out these blogs for all the details. Deepesh’s Blog Tomek’s Blog...

The DomainDataSource (DDS) could be a great example of an aggregate component . It has a simple public API and does a lot of awesome things at the flip of a switch. The only problem with the thought is there’s little-to-no aggregation going on. All the...

The second most requested feature on our WCF RIA Services Wish List is an MVVM-friendly DomainDataSource . The neat part about this request is that it means many different things to many different people. The challenge in addressing it is to figure out...

In Authorization Sample 301 I explained the ins-and-outs of the authorization sample and offered a few hints as to how it could be used. In this post, I will show a specific example where I show how to extend the authorization library to support read...

In Authorization Sample 301 I explained the ins-and-outs of the authorization sample and offered a few hints as to how it could be used. In this post, I will show a specific example where I put together an authorized form using the Model-View-ViewModel...