WCF RIA Services Toolkit

The WCF RIA Services Toolkit bundles a collection of components that aim to complete the feature set made available to programmers by the WCF RIA Services, easing the development of Rich Internet Applications (or, in short, RIA), such as the ones build using Silverlight or ASP.NET.

The toolkit includes new functionality that it not included in the RIA Services release cycle, ready to assist developers in their quest for app quality and reliability. It provides frameworks and services that can enhance the pattern provided by the RIA Services, helping them to make the application logic available to the client and gain full control over the server data.

WCF RIA Services Toolkit features EntityFramework 4.1 support, thanks to the DbDomainService integration, which ensures DbContext and Code-First compatiblity. Linq to SQL support is also added, as well as options to use Windows Azure Table Storage to store your data. However, note that Windows Azure SDK 1.3 is required in this latter case.

WCF RIA Services Toolkit allows the exposing of SOAP and JSON endpoints for a DomainService by default. ASP.NET developers will be glad to know that their applications can be easily linked to the DomainService.

For those who work with Silverlight, WCF RIA Services Toolkit brings to the table other options: it can generate up-to-date WCF proxy and configuration settings every time the application is built.