CODEWITHSUNDEEP
silverlightwcfwcf-ria-servicesbasichttpbinding
Evan Larsen
Evan Larsen

Reputation: 9965

Why would anyone use WCF basicHttp webservice over WCF RIA Services in Silverlight?

So, I've been using WCF Ria services for a few months now and I am wondering why would anyone use WCF basicHttp webservice over using WCF RIA Services?

Someone told me that RIA Services is not good for Enterprise Level Applications and I am wondering why?

W/out RIA it seems you have to write validation logic in 2 areas, client and server. Also, RIA handles roles and membership fairly easily.

How much extra work is involved if you want to use WCF basicHttp webservice? What is the benifit over using RIA? and.. Does anyone have any good examples of an enterprise level silverlight application using wcf basicHttp webservice?

Thanks!

Upvotes: 2

Views: 820

Answers (2)

Chris Anderson
Chris Anderson

Reputation: 8369

It's fair to say RIA Services has had its growing pains. Some of my biggest bugbears with it (such as not having the ability to return complex objects that aren't entities from Invoke methods, and the lack of decent support for being used in an MVVM way) have mostly been fixed in RIA Services SP1. Some people I know using it in huge enterprise applications have had major headaches with it (at least in the early days). I'm not quite sure where things stand now in that respect, as to whether their particular problems have been resolved yet.

That said, I personally think it's a fantastic technology. It makes tasks that are painful with standard WCF services easy (my favourite is being able to specify queries on the client on methods in your domain service that return IQueryable, that execute on the server - making sorting/filtering/grouping/paging a breeze). Whether it's right for you depends on your scenario. It's designed primarily to make performing CRUD operations on entities easy, so if that's primarily what you need then its perfect. RIA Services is designed to be consumed by Silverlight application only however (at least for the moment). You can access them from other clients, but you don't get all the features that makes them so good. So if you need to support other client platforms, it may not be the right fit.

I think RIA Services is awesome, but ultimately it depends on your scenario as to whether they are right for your project. As a technology, it's geared towards particular scenarios, and isn't intended to solve all the world's software development problems. Some people who might complain about it possibly aren't using it in the way it was intended, and pushing its limits (that said, it isn't perfect either, and has had its issues). If you can possibly provide some more details (such as the scale of the application, the client platforms it needs to support, and the number of developers on the project), I'd probably be able to give you some more helpful advice.

Hope this helps...

Chris

Upvotes: 1

Keith Adler
Keith Adler

Reputation: 21178

The issues with WCF support in Silverlight relates to the limited subset of the .NET Framework embedded in the Silverlight plug-in as it's essentially a scaled down version of the .NET Framework. As a result of the scaled down .NET runtime in the Silverlight plug-in, it does not have the same full support for WCF that you get from standard .NET projects. This was done to make the initial download of SL quick from a client perspective and increase time-to-market of SL as a product. Keep in mind that the SL plug-in has no dependency on an existing .NET framework being installed which is why Linux, Windows Phone 7, and OS X versions are on the market.

As time has progressed they continue to add in-demand features in. For example, Silverlight 5 will support WS-Trust (see here for a complete list of new features in 5).

I recommend you read this resource to see what you may miss out on by trying to call WCF Services from the client:

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc896571(v=vs.95).aspx

Keep in mind you could very easily proxy out calls to more complex WCF services through RIA Services endpoints which are in effect calling the service directly from server-side.

As for using standard WCF instead of RIA ... there are advantages when your middle tier has multiple client types, though with RIA you could simply expose your endpoints out as SOAP 1.1 endpoints and require people to connect using that paradigm instead of WCF. You do not have to use RIA or nothing; you could mix and match to meet your requirements as you see fit. Personally I am big on just using RIA if at all possible.

Upvotes: 1

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