Installation instructions:-

1. Uninstall WCF RIA Services Toolkit (if installed)
2. Uninstall WCF RIA Services V1.0 for Visual Studio 2010
3. Install WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta
4. Install WCF RIA Services Toolkit  October 2010

These set of bits are compatible with Silverlight 4 and Visual Studio 2010 and are now available for you to download.

About the download

This download is contains all the assemblies and is a standalone msi. You do not need to have V1.0 installed in your box and it is completely an in-place update. Just follow the steps above and you should be good to go. Also, this is a Go-Live release.

What’s new in the WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta release?

Shared Entities across multiple DomainServices

With the latest bits we have dropped the restriction that blocked multiple DomainServices from exposing the same Entity. 

Support for Complex Objects

WCF RIA now supports structural non-entity types.

Client code generation extensibility

WCF RIA Services now allows the client proxy generator to be replaced, either with a text template or with a plain CLR Type that implements IDomainServiceClientCodeGenerator like this:

   1: namespace MyCodeGenerator

   2: {

   3:     [DomainServiceClientCodeGenerator(typeof(MyCodeGenerator), "C#")]

   4:     public partial class MyT4CodeGenerator : IDomainServiceClientCodeGenerator

   5:     {

   7:         public string GenerateCode(ICodeGenerationHost host, 

   8:                                    IEnumerable<System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Server.DomainServiceDescription> domainServiceDescriptions,

   9:                                     ClientCodeGenerationOptions options)

  10:         {

  11:             return “Here is generated code”;

  12:         }

  13:     }

  14: }

  15:  

A code generator is registered merely by adding to a server project a reference to its assembly, or by declaring the code generator class directly in the server project. MEF is used to recognize the [DomainServiceClientCodeGenerator] attribute among the server’s references. We have also released a TextTemplatingCodeGeneration in the Toolkit that can be used to customize the generated code. Note: the code generator is build on top of this extensibility. 

Better Binding support for EntitySet and EntityCollection

EntitySet and EntityCollection now implements ICollectionViewFactory and returns a view when bound to controls likes DataForm and DataGrid. Now you will be able to Add/Remove via a Dataform when it’s bound to a EntitySet and EntityCollection.

Improved Business Application Template

· The Login and Registration windows open with focus in the Name field

· Both windows also listen for the Enter and Escape keys, submitting or canceling accordingly

· The Windows authentication status control shows an ‘authenticating…’ message

· And more

Also check out Kyle’s blog for a customized look of the BAT. This theme is going to be made available only via the Visual Studio Gallery.

Localization

The product, assemblies and templates is now localized into 10 languages. These languages are :-

• German
• English
• Spanish
• French
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Russian
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)

Faster Install

Hate the time-consuming installer, we heard you. Our installer is now less than a couple of minutes on most machines.

What’s new in the WCF RIA Services Toolkit October 2010 ?

With this release of the SP1 beta, we are also releasing a compatible version of the toolkit. The May2010 toolkit will still be available for you to use with V1.0 May release. Note, the October 2010 release will only work with the V1.0 SP1 Beta.

Here are the new additions:-

<Shamelessly taken from Tomek’s Blog">

• Domain Service support for Windows Azure Table Storage. When hosting WCF RIA Services in Windows Azure, you can now easily leverage Windows Azure Table Storage as your data backend. Read more at Kyle McClellan’s blog.
• T4 template based client code generation. The feature leverages the code generation extensibility point added to the product and provides a well factored and granular mechanism to customize client code generation logic using T4 templates.

</Shamelessly taken from Tomek’s Blog">

We would love to hear your feedback so be sure to get back to us via forums, twitter etc.

Cheers

We realize this is an issue most folks are running into and we have fixed this template and we are looking ways to get you access to it. However, there is a relatively easy workaround to fix this issue.

The steps involved are :-

1. Create a new or open up an existing application that was created using the BusinessApplicationTemplate
2. Once the project is open, go to the Project Properties page for the Silverlight Application.
3. In that, first uncheck the OOB option which is enabled by default

1. Save the project
2. Close the Project Property Page
3. Open the Project Property page again
4. Then go ahead and check the OOB option.

1. In doing the stop above, the web server information and all data are now setup correctly.
2. Run the App
3. Voila!

Cheers!!

Earlier I had posted about the theme pack for the Silverlight Business Application and amongst them was the Cosmopolitan template. The cosmopolitan theme is inspired by the Metro theme which was first seen in the the Zune Client.

Since then, there have been many variations of the Metro theme, Windows Phone 7, Metrotwit, the Cosmopolitan theme  and many more. They are all inspired by the Metro theme. Recently, Nikola. pointed out one of the key differences between the Zune client and the Cosmopolitan theme. One thing, I would like to call out is that they are just different variations. However, I do understand that there is a demand to create a app that looks and feels like the Zune client and in this post I will show you how that can be done using the Cosmo theme.Thanks Tsitsi for your help. She is also the designer that created these designs. I would definitely recommend subscribing to her blog. First download and install the theme pack, the instructions can be found here.

Making my app look and feel like the Zune client

Let’s start of by creating a Silverlight Business application Cosmopolitan template. Once that is created, follow these steps:-

In Fonts.xaml

1. In the client project, open up Assets\Fonts.xaml
2. Look for following keys and the change their value
   1. ApplicationNameFontSize to 20
   2. NavigationFontSize to 20

   1: <my:Double x:Key="ApplicationNameFontSize">20</my:Double>

   2: <my:Double x:Key="HeaderFontSize">21.333</my:Double>

   3: <my:Double x:Key="NavigationFontSize">20</my:Double>

In Styles.xaml

1. In the client project, open up Assets\Styles.xaml and make the following changes(highlighted in yellow):-

<!-- ApplicationName Style -->

<Style x:Key="ApplicationNameStyle" TargetType="TextBlock">

        <Setter Property="Foreground" Value="{StaticResource BlackBrush}"/>

        <Setter Property="FontFamily" Value="{StaticResource ContentFontFamily}"/>

        <Setter Property="FontSize" Value="{StaticResource ApplicationNameFontSize}"/>

        <Setter Property="FontWeight" Value="Bold"/>

        <Setter Property="TextOptions.TextHintingMode" Value="Animated" />

        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="32,-4,0,-3"/>

        <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Center"/>

        <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left"/>

    </Style>

<!-- Links Border Style -->

<Style x:Key="LinksBorderStyle" TargetType="Border">

        <Setter Property="Height" Value="40"/>

        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0,32,10,0"/>

        <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left"/>

        <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Top" />

        <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="{StaticResource HighlightBrush}"/>

        <Setter Property="BorderThickness" Value="14,0,0,0"/>

    </Style>

<!-- Links StackPanel Style -->

<Style x:Key="LinksStackPanelStyle" TargetType="StackPanel">

        <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Bottom"/>

        <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Left"/>

        <Setter Property="Orientation" Value="Horizontal"/>

        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="10,0,0,-7"/>

    </Style>

<!-- Logo Icon Style -->

    <Style x:Key="LogoIcon" TargetType="ContentControl">

        <Setter Property="Height" Value="30"/>

        <Setter Property="Width" Value="35"/>

        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0,0,53,0"/>

        <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Top" />

        <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Right" />

        <Setter Property="Template">

            <Setter.Value>

                <ControlTemplate TargetType="ContentControl">

                    <Grid>

                        <Rectangle Fill="{StaticResource HighlightBrush}"/>

                    </Grid>

                </ControlTemplate>

            </Setter.Value>

        </Setter>

    </Style>

<!-- Content Frame Style -->

    <Style x:Key="ContentFrameStyle" TargetType="navigation:Frame">

        <Setter Property="Background" Value="Transparent"/>

        <Setter Property="BorderBrush" Value="Transparent"/>

        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0,75,0,0"/>

        <Setter Property="Padding" Value="30,15,58,15"/>

        <Setter Property="VerticalContentAlignment" Value="Stretch"/>

        <Setter Property="HorizontalContentAlignment" Value="Stretch"/>

    </Style>

<!-- Branding Border Style -->

    <Style x:Key="BrandingBorderStyle" TargetType="Border">

        <Setter Property="Height" Value="Auto"/>

        <Setter Property="Margin" Value="0,0,20,10"/>

        <Setter Property="VerticalAlignment" Value="Top"/>

        <Setter Property="HorizontalAlignment" Value="Stretch"/>

    </Style>

In ApplicationStrings.resx

1. Open up Assets\Resources\ApplicationStrings.resx file and make the following changes
   1. AboutPageTitle to “ABOUT”
   2. HomePageTitle to “HOME”
   3. ApplicationName to “application name”

The end result of these changes will be an application that looks like the Zune Client. Here is a screenshot:-

Cheers and enjoy!!

So, What is Windows Server AppFabric?

Windows Server AppFabric is a set of integrated technologies that make it easier to build, scale and manage Web and composite applications that run on IIS. You can install and read more about it here. Also, check out the white paper located here. One of the component that Windows Server AppFabric provides is the monitoring AppFabric dashboard in IIS.

The app fabric dashboards lets you monitor any .NET 4 WCF an WF services with monitoring enabled. As you are all aware that a Domain Service is a WCF service and one of the things we enabled in our RTM build was to enable monitoring for the DomainService. However, this will only work when the web application is hosted in full trust.

Check out this episode on EndPoint.tv for more deatils

Endpoint.TV – Windows Server AppFabric in action monitoring and troubleshooting

How do we enable AppFabric monitoring for a DomainService?

Enabling AppFabric monitoring for a domain service is very easy. Here is what you would need to do:-

• Create a new RIA Services project
• Go to the web project and right click to go to properties
• Go to the web node and select Use Local IIS Server.

• Once that is done and your application is configured and running properly, go to the web.config file and add the following entries. One for each DomainService exposed.

   1: <system.serviceModel>

   2:  

   3:    <serviceHostingEnvironment aspNetCompatibilityEnabled="true" multipleSiteBindingsEnabled="true">

   4:  

   5:      <serviceActivations>

   6:        <add service="MSTravel.Web.Services.TailSpinTravelService" factory="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServiceHostFactory, System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" relativeAddress="~/Services/MSTravel-Web-Services-TailSpinTravelService.svc" />

   7:        <add service="MSTravel.Web.AuthenticationService" factory="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServiceHostFactory, System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" relativeAddress="~/Services/MSTravel-Web-AuthenticationService.svc" />

   8:        <add service="MSTravel.Web.UserRegistrationService" factory="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServiceHostFactory, System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" relativeAddress="~/Services/MSTravel-Web-UserRegistrationService.svc" />

   9:      </serviceActivations>

  10:  

  11:    </serviceHostingEnvironment>

  12:  

  13:  </system.serviceModel>

• All that we are doing above is to add the activation for SVC less WCF Service.
• Save the web config and compile and run the application
• Now go to the IIS and browse to your Virtual Directory and you will notice the AppFabric DashBoard.

• Double click on the AppFabric Dashboard and you will get all the monitoring information you need.

You can use the AppFabric dashboard to monitor and track the usage of your DomainService. As you can see it gives you all the error and completed tracked events.

Cheers and Enjoy!!

Notes: Courtesy of Tim

At the link above you’ll find 3 files to download:

• README_FIRST.txt – please read this :-) but basically I’m writing the same thing here.
• SL4Themes-templates.zip – this includes a folder for Expression Blend and Visual Studio templates.  The VS folder also has a sub-folder for the RIA Services templates.
• SL4Themes-rawassets.zip – this is another (optional) zip that includes the resource dictionaries for each template on their own without any Silverlight project.

The three templates we released are :-

Cosmopolitan:-

See it in action here:- https://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl4/themes/cosmopolitan.html#/Home

Windows 7 Theme: 

See it in action here:- https://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl4/themes/windows7.html#/Core

Accent Color Theme:

See it in action here:-https://www.silverlight.net/content/samples/sl4/themes/accent.html

These application make the Silverlight Business Application Template just awesome.

Cheers and Enjoy!!

You can download the source here:-

https://cid-9d24497f7fef8f33.office.live.com/self.aspx/Demo/TechEd%202010%20-%20Web%20307.zip

Steps:

1. Install RIA Services V1, if you don’t have it. https://www.silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices/
2. Download the zip
3. Unblock it and then Unzip it
4. Launch the solution and ensure that Web project is set as the startup
5. Run the application
6. Register a new user

Note: If you encounter an error when running the application, just run the application again.

Check out the admin page where, i create one screen that modifies 8 Lookup Tables. You can do as many as you want.

Also, check out the Tips page to recap the Tips we covered in the talk.

I will follow up with a more detailed post with details and steps.

Cheers!!

I was really surprised to see the number of folks that came out there and really glad to see the response RIA Services got . I was at the Silverlight booth most of the time and it was just amazing seeing so many questions from so many different people. Its just great to know that so many folks are using our product.

I had the opportunity to talk at three different occasion during TecheEd, I did a short demo in the JasonZ Developer Foundation Sessions, then i had an interactive session where I talked about accessing web services in Silverlight.

Here are the recordings for those sessions:-

Foundations session by Jason Zander. My demo is around the 43 min mark

Interactive Session ( will update it )

Breakout Session: WEB 307 – Effective RIA: Tips and tricks for building Rich Internet Application

I have not had the chance to clean up the source code for all the demos. I will follow up with the code for most of them soon. Stay Tuned!!

Cheers!!

Oh and be sure to check out for Silverlight TV Episode 28. It’s going to be awesome!! Stay Tuned!

Why would you expose other endpoints?

As you all are aware, RIA Services has a great story OM and  tooling story for Silverlight.What if you want a mobile application talking to a domain service or an Ajax application? There could be various different reasons why one would want to expose a different endpoint. The great thing is that enabling these endpoints requires minimal changes in your application.

What do I need to expose these endpoints?

You will need the following components:-

1. Visual Studio 2010 or Visual Web Developer Express 2010
2. Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010 (contains WCF RIA Services for Visual Studio 2010)
   • Contains the OData endpoint
3. WCF RIA Services Toolkit for SOAP and JSON endpoints

Creating Endpoints

Creating an OData Endpoint

The OData endpoint support is provided out of the box for you. Here is how you can expose an OData Endpoint.

Creating a new DomainService

1. Create a new or open up an existing RIA Services Project.
2. Right click on the server project and add a new DomainService class (assuming you have a DataModel in your project).
3. When the DomainService Wizard comes up, select the model you want to expose and then check the  “Expose OData Endpoint”
4. Click Ok
5. Now you have a DomainService that exposes 2 endpoints:-
   • Binary
   • Odata

Modifying an existing DomainService to expose an OData Endpoint as well

1. Create a new or open up an existing RIA Services Project.
2. Open up your DomainService
3. Find the query method for your entity type. NOTE: This query method should be parameter less
4. Add the following attribute on that query method [Query(IsDefault=true)]

      1: [Query(IsDefault=true)]

      2:     public IQueryable<Book> GetBooks()

      3:     {

      4:         return this.ObjectContext.Books.OrderBy(b => b.Title);

      5:     }

5. Add a reference to System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.Odata can be found in Program Files\Microsoft SDK’s\RIA Services
6. Open up the web.config file and add the following section directly under configuration

      1: <configSections>

      2:     <sectionGroup name="system.serviceModel">

      3:       <section name="domainServices"

      4:                type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.DomainServicesSection,

      5:                System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting, 

      6:                Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, 

      7:                PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35" 

      8:                allowDefinition="MachineToApplication" 

      9:                requirePermission="false" />

     10:       

     11:     </sectionGroup>

     12:   </configSections>

     13:   

7. Under the System.ServiceModel section add the following

      1: <domainServices>

      2:     <endpoints>

      3:       <add name="OData"

      4:            type="System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.ODataEndpointFactory, System.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting.OData, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />        

      5:     </endpoints>

      6:   </domainServices>

      7:   

8. Now compile and run the application

NOTE: The ODATA endpoint has very limited support in V1. There is no Update or LINQ query support in this release.

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!!

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):-

1. Update of nullable members set to default value are now handled correctly
2. Drag-drop enhancements: Images are bound one-way by default, ValidateOnException added.
3. RIA Services framework now has built in ETW traces
4. Domain Service Wizard now picks up changes in the Data Model.
5. Toolkit: ASP.net dynamic data template
6. Toolkit: WCF In-memory tracing support is available, making it easier to troubleshoot failure in shared hosting scenario. (See Tomek’s blog on usage)
7. Toolkit: WCF client proxy auto generation/updating for WCF Core Service – This enables you to get up-to-date WCF proxy and configuration each time you build your solution, when you add Silverlight-enable WCF service in your Silverlight application.
8. Other bug fixes

We would love to hear your feedback so be sure to get back to us via forums, twitter etc.

Cheers