Wednesday, April 13, 2011

WCF RIA Services - MIX11 Releases

by Jeff Handley via Jeff Handley on 4/13/2011 6:40:34 PM

This week at MIX, the RIA Services team has put out two releases:

WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2 Preview (April 2011)

Download available here.  This MSI is also included with the Silverlight 5 Beta Tools.
Note: you cannot have both SP1 and SP2 installed on your machine.  Installing SP2 will upgrade your machine from SP1 to SP2.

This is a Preview-quality release and does not include a Go-Live license.  Here’s what you’ll find within this release:

1. Support for Silverlight 5 Beta - SP1 does not properly perform code generation when targeting Silverlight 5
2. Also works for Silverlight 4
3. Full support of the DateTimeOffset data type
4. The ability to tag server requests with a Client/Session Id known as an OperationTag, for per-client/session tracing/tracking
5. Bug fixes

WCF RIA Services Toolkit (April 2011)

Download available here. Or use the NuGet packages shown below. The Linq To SQL DomainService and the ASP.NET Web Forms controls are only available through the MSI.

This is a new drop of the Toolkit, replacing the December 2010 version.  This version of the Toolkit works for both WCF RIA Services SP1 and SP2, and both Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5.  Here is what you’ll find in this new drop:

1. Works with both SP1 and SP2, providing Silverlight 4 or Silverlight 5 support
2. Updates to the ViewModel features (such as the DomainCollectionView) to work with 3rd party controls and to fix some bugs and memory leaks
3. Updates to the T4 Code Generation to allow you to create VB code generators using the T4 approach
4. An early preview of the new jQuery client for RIA Services, as announced by Brad Olenick during his MIX talk

Toolkit NuGet Packages

As an alternative to the Toolkit MSI, we are now also publishing NuGet packages for many of the features found in the Toolkit.  This allows you to install the package directly into your project without installing the MSI on your machine.  For more information about NuGet, check out the official NuGet website.  All of our NuGet packages are prefixed with “RIAServices.” and here is what you can find out there today:

1. RIAServices.Endpoints - Registers the SOAP and JSON endpoints in your project, adding the Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Hosting assembly reference and updating your web.config to expose the endpoints.  More info from Deepesh Mohnani.
   
2. RIAServices.WindowsAzure - References the Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.WindowsAzure assembly that includes the TableDomainService<T> class to allow you to easily build Domain Services on top of Windows Azure Table Storage.  More info from Kyle McClellan.
   
3. RIAServices.T4 - Includes the Microsoft.ServiceModel.DomainServices.Tools.TextTemplate assembly that enables T4-based code generation for your Silverlight client.  More info from Varun Puranik.
   
4. RIAServices.ViewModel - Includes the DomainCollectionView class for Silverlight, providing excellent ViewModel (MVVM) support for RIA Services, adding a reference to Microsoft.Windows.Data.DomainServices. More info from Kyle McClellan.
   
5. RIAServices.jQuery - An early preview of the jQuery client for RIA Services. Provides JavaScript files and updates your JSON endpoint to add a transmitMetadata="true" property that allows your model's metadata to be transmitted with requests. More info here.
   
6. RIAServices.Toolkit.All - One NuGet package that includes all of the packages above.