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As we’ve all been guilty, when you see demonstrations of technologies most of the time the data samples show single table solutions.  When was the last time you’ve developed a single-table system? :-)  Thought so.

In RIA Services demonstrations, most of them have been single-table samples as well.  So how do you go about retrieving relational data (master/details type) with RIA Services?

Here's an interesting video that gives you an idea of what working with data on the web can be when using Silverlight.

The following video demonstrates some of our technical capabilities, including data management, super pivots, tree maps, time series forecasting, correlation analysis, decision trees, clustering, similarity maps, and outlier detection. We just can't show you everything, so for example, keep in mind that it's all programmable. To better understand what this can mean for your data, click here. To sign up and crunch your own data for free, click here.

I will also walk through several techniques that can be used to pass exception information using undeclared and declared faults from Windows Communication Foundation (WCF) Web services to Silverlight. I will start by demonstrating what happens when an exception occurs and how to add some quick changes to the configuration to show information while debugging. Then, I will show you how to set up a strategic fault pattern to handle the passing exception information over SOAP services, using declared faults. All code is based on the Silverlight 3 beta and accompanies this article online.

.Net RIA Services will allow us to create business logic on the server and to access that same set of classes on the client.  We will retrieve the data from these business classes and display them in a data grid within a business application, that is a multipage Silverlight application.

As a best practice for String resource localization, in your Silverlight application structure, organize your resource files accordingly.  We’re going to use the RESX file approach and let the framework do most of the work for us.  To that regard in my application I have created a folder called Resources and will be placing my RESX files there.  I’ll first add the default set of data, adding a new RESX file named Strings.resx.

In a previous post I discussed the advantage of separating the Data Access Layer (retrieving data from your data store) from the Data Transport Layer (moving data from the server to your client.  We then took a small but important detour into an introduction to  Linq.  This posting will expand upon Linq sufficient to allow a good understanding of how we’ll be using Linq in the rest of the project.

Over the next few postings, we’ll be working with that Data in five distinct ways:

1. Gather data from the bloggers about themselves, their blog and each entry
2. Store that data in a database
3. Extract that data as needed from the database
4. Transmit the data to a Silverlight application
5. Display the data in a Silverlight application

In this section Brad Abrams wanted to take up a challenge that Ben Hayat sent him to show that Silverlight and RIA Services are really capable of building real business applications. 

Apparently real business applications include more than one table, and even more than simple master details.  But they also include hierarchal data.  For example you have an Orders table that has an associated set of line items in a separate LineItems table, but the Orders keeps track of total sales, net, tax and number of lines, as each line gets added or deleted. 

Here are the previous parts of Brad's series:

• Part 1: Navigation Basics
• Part 2: Rich Data Query
• Part 3: Authentication
• Part 4: SEO, Export to Excel and Out of Browser
• Part 5: Astoria, Add Service Reference and WinForms
• Part 6: Data Transfer Objects (DTOs)
• Part 7: ADO.NET Data Services Based Data Store
• Part 8: WCF Based Data Source
• Part 9: POCO and Authentication Provider
• Part 10: LinqToSql
• Part 11: The Client-Only World
• Part 12: DataSet
• Part 13: The New Class Library Project
• Part 14: Visual Basic (VB) and WPF Support
• Part 15: ASP.NET MVC
• Part 16: Exposing a WCF Service
• Part 17: Evolving an Application
• Part 18: Custom Linq Provider
• Part 19: ASP.NET Dynamic Data
• Part 20: NHibernate

Shawn Wildermuth gives a brief overview of his first look at the July .NET RIA Services CTP.

I've finally had a chance to take a look at the July CTP of RIA Services. My opinion is mixed, but its still pretty early. I ran through the simple walkthrough and it was easy to set up but it still felt as if there is too much Visual Studio magic (a complaint I've had for a long time now).