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1. Introduction

In this short series of articles I’ll show you how to integrate Telerik OpenAccess ORM in Silverlight applications, how to solve issues when applying this pattern and how to take advantage from this great product. What will be covered?

• WCF RIA Applications with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part I: The Basics
• WCF RIA Applications with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part II: Create, Update, Delete and Validation
• Creating Silverlight Applications with Telerik OpenAccess Data Service Wizard
• WCF Data Services with Telerik OpenAccess ORM
• WCF End Points Services with Telerik OpenAccess ORM
• Silverlight Applications for Windows Azure with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part I: Connection to SQL Azure
• Silverlight Applications for Windows Azure with Telerik OpenAccess ORM Part II: Developing the Silverlight Client and Deploying the Application

This article is Part 1 of the series WCF RIA Services:

1. Getting Started with WCF RIA Services
2. Querying Data Through WCF RIA Services
3. Updating Data Through WCF RIA Services
4. WCF RIA Services and MVVM
5. Metadata Classes and Shared Code in WCF RIA Services
6. Validating Data with WCF RIA Services
7. Authenticating and Authorizing Calls in WCF RIA Services
8. Debugging and Testing WCF RIA Services Applications
9. Structuring WCF RIA Services Applications
10. Exposing Additional Domain Service Endpoints for Other Clients

Introduction

In order to build serious business application in Silverlight (and other client technologies), you have to work with a lot of data. And that data is usually not resident on the client machine, it is usually distributed amongst many clients and is stored and operated on by back-end services. If you try to write this kind of application architecture yourself, you have to tackle a lot of technologies and write a lot of plumbing. In the end, most of what you are doing is pushing and pulling data from the client to the back end and invoking operations on the server from the Silverlight client application.

One of the recurrent questions people ask me in the forums is about the applying of security constraint to the applications being developed. The last releases of useful tools like WCF Ria Services added the capability of bringing the security context from the server to the plugin running into the browser. This let the developer to have the current logged-in user and his roles available to apply rules to elements of the user interface.

With WCF Ria Services you can create easily an AuthenticationDomainContext and when you make a reference to it from a Silverlight project you will have available a class named WebContext.

I think some of you may have developed an application that requires a lot of roundtrips on the server to retrieve data to be displayed to the user. Every time your application goes to the server it may have to wait for long running query to end its works, perhaps because the data are extracted from an huge database. Then it have to download the data and finally display them onto the screen.

If you have already deal with this kind of interaction you should know that the two connection limit of the web browser can become evident. For some of you that are not aware of this limitation you have to know that due to the RFC 2616 specification, the compliant browsers have not to hammer the network and are limited to make only two simultaneous connections to the server (per domain).