Part 6 of my series on WCF RIA Services is now live here:

http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/WCF-RIA-Services-Part-6-Validating-Data.aspx

In this episode, I explore the awesome validation infrastructure of RIA Services, one of my favorite benefits of RIA Services. I show how to use the built-in validation attributes of the System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations namespace on both the client and server side, how to use custom validation via attributes, how to invoke validation logic on the server side and return errors that get automatically associated with the entities client side, and how to use Invoke methods to call async validation logic from the client.

Check it out!

Saturday, August 28, 2010 2:58:09 AM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Yesterday I was getting frustrated wading through the dozens of Silverlight controls in my toolbox trying to spot one I needed, and it occurred to me that there “ought to be an add-in to search the toolbox”. Just to make sure I wasn’t missing something, I contacted Karl Shifflett from the Cider team, who has written some awesome extensions to Cider and the XAML editor himself. He reached out to the right people on the VS team, and lo and behold, there is already a hidden search feature there.

You can read about it here. Thanks Karl and Josh!!

Saturday, August 21, 2010 3:51:17 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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From October 11-15 I’ll be conducting a WCF Master Class in Minneapolis. This class covers the breadth and depth of WCF all in one week. You can find the course information here.

If you want to get to the expert level with WCF in a week’s span, this is the class for you. We have been teaching an evolving version of this class since before WCF was released in 2006. It gets rave reviews every time, as long as you are not opposed to some hard core, in depth, fill your brain until it is ready to burst kind of learning.

If you have any questions about the content, you can contact me on twitter @briannoyes.

Hope to see you there.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 7:51:39 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Part 5 of my 10 part series on WCF RIA Services is now up on The Silverlight Show at http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/WCF-RIA-Services-Part-5-Metadata-and-Shared-Classes.aspx.

In this article, I explain the role and use of metadata classes to add attributes and functionality to existing entity classes that you cannot easily modify directly, such as the properties on an Entity Framework entity. Additionally, I show how you can define chunks of shared code on the server side and how they become available client side through the RIA Services code generation.

Tuesday, August 17, 2010 6:38:47 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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Part 4 of my series of WCF RIA Services is now live on The Silverlight Show here.

In this episode, I focus on using RIA Services in an MVVM world. That includes not using the DomainDataSource anymore and encapsulating the domain context in your view model and making the calls through it from there. You can expose the entity collections from the domain context directly as properties on the view model because they are a collection that raises CollectionChanged events when the underlying data changes, and the entities implement INotifyPropertyChanged so they participate nicely with data binding. They also implement INotifyDataErrorInfo and integrate nicely with the Silverlight data binding mechanisms.

The only downside to that approach is that you cannot easily mock out the domain context dependency, so it makes it hard to unit test your view model, which is one of the motivations for using the view model pattern in the first place. At the end of the article I point to a recommended solution from the RIA Services team – specifically to mock out the DomainClient that sits on the other side of the domain context and makes the actual service calls. That is not super easy, but it is at least a solution. I’m going to expand my sample to include that approach in Part 8 of the series.

Check it out and let me know what you think.

Wednesday, August 4, 2010 5:11:27 PM (GMT Daylight Time, UTC+01:00)
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