RIA Services - Documentation Guidance and Community Samples

As the RIA Services team is wrapping up our V1 release, several team members have been diving into the forums, writing blog posts, and in general trying to connect with the community to make sure we’re tying up all of our loose ends.  We would also like to make sure that we have our documentation bases covered, but we’d like to solicit some candid feedback for this area in particular.

Documentation Approaches

What forms of documentation would you like to see us work on?  Do you like quick-start tutorials, or do you prefer deep-dives?  How would you prioritize these efforts?  In your eyes, what’s the best way for us to explain the various features of the framework with you?

Karl Shifflett and I concluded that it would be great to have a 1-page quick reference guide to the RIA Services metadata attributes.  This would show a quick illustration of when and how to use attributes like [Include], [Exclude], and [Association].  Do you agree that this would be useful?  Are there other 1-page quick references that you can think of?

Sample Applications

We’re also interested to know if you have any RIA Services sample applications that you’d like to see added to our Code Gallery site or the silverlight.net community samples.  We know that many of you (yes, I’m looking at you Fredrik and Colin) have been doing an amazing job of building up the RIA Services community… do you have sample applications you’d like to share?

Any Favorites?

What are your favorite links out there for learning RIA Services?  Did you like Brad’s 26-part series, Deepesh’s guide to Configuring your DomainServices for Windows Phone 7, Nikhil’s RIA Services and Validation post, Colin Blair’s blog, Fredrik Normén’s blog, or anything else?  Or do you simply jump onto MSDN and call it a day?  Post your favorite links and we’ll make sure they get some link-love!  And we’ll also look at those articles to see if we can get more similarly styled documentation created.

General Feedback

We’d also like to hear your general impression of how we’re doing with documentation.  What are we doing that you love, and what do you hate?  We are open to all forms of (constructive) feedback so please let us know how we can improve.  We would really appreciate any guidance you have to offer!

Feel free just to leave comments here, and I’ll aggregate them and share them with the team.