Creating the first project

I watched the first video in module 2, which discussed RIA Services and Data Binding.

Here is the timeline (as relevant to me)

[00:00] Introduction

[01:13] The WCF RIA Services link (what will this do?)

[03:24] RIA Domain Service

[06:11] Data Binding

[06:45] Creating New Project

[08:46] The login and registration pages

[09:18] Adding data to the application (along with the Entity Data Model and Domain Service)

[12:40] Adding a data grid

[13:57] Launch the application in the browser

My Notes:

We do not need to write DTO by hand, no dealing with concurrency, RIA also does pagination and change tracking

DomainServices provides methods which can be accessed on the client. It usually consists of methods which will provide us with basic CRUD services (auto generated which can be refactored by us)... The Entity class can be implemented by one of many technologies... the client gets the domain context through which it can call methods of the domain service.

RIA Services also give us automated data binding

The client.bin folder contains the build output which is the xap file.

We do not necassarily have to use the Entity framework

RIA services provides observable collections which will observe the data in the actual database tables

RIA services automates a lot of things which we would have to otherwise write by hand

Creating the project: working on Activity 1

The first thing I need to do is create a new Silverlight Business Applications Project. I opened Visual Studio 2010, and selected "new project", then selected "Visual C#". On the right hand side, I should have seen an option to create a Silverlight Business Application, but I see only an option to create a Silverlight Application. Perhaps, I need to install Silverlight Tools for Visual Studio 2010.

I downloaded Silverlight 4.0 tools for Visual Studio 2010. With Silverlight 4.0 tools, I can create a Silverlight Business Application.