I came to Microsoft 2 years ago to join project Alexandria, which had the goal of making Silverlight an approachable framework for building business applications. The domain really excited me and it’s been an honor to work on this product. In case you’ve been living under a rock, we released the official 1.0 version of RIA Services back on May 17th. Here are some links to announcements that I’m sure you’ve already seen.
There were about 1000 other posts that I saw from folks too, which was exciting. The level of enthusiasm around our product is fantastic.
Beyond Version 1.0
Our team isn’t slowing down at all. In fact, if anything, we’re picking up the pace. We’re restructured the team and we’ve adopted the Scrum model; we started our 3rd 2-week iteration today in fact. I’m really proud that our team has been open in the past, and we’re turning that up a notch by asking the community to help us shape our subsequent releases.
After releasing version 1.0, we compiled our list of DCRs (Design Change Requests) that we had not completed for our first release, and we published the list on uservoice and asked everyone to vote for what they think is important. If you haven’t voted yet, please go to http://riaservices.mswish.net and cast your 10 votes. I was asked over Twitter which of the features on the list we’re seriously looking at; the answer was all of them. We’re truthfully using this list as an input factor into our prioritization (it’s not the only input factor of course though).
One of the items that is currently near the top of the list is using T4 for code generation. We were discussing this item in a meeting today and several of us wondered if that feature has enough “Pow Effect,” and I’d love to hear what you think about that. In fact, I went ahead and set up a quick poll here: http://twtpoll.com/bb5rvc - Tell us, does T4 support count as a “sizable feature?” In my mind, it does, because of the extensibility it would offer to the product. For instance, perhaps AJAX/jQuery support could be built on top of RIA Services using a custom T4 template; or maybe someone could create a UI scaffolding solution using T4 templates. I consider the long-term benefits of T4 support limitless, even if we don’t open up all of the possible scenarios with our first T4-compatible release.
If you’d like to influence the direction of RIA Services, I hope that you’ll reach out to us as much as we’re trying to reach out to you. Go to the uservoice site and vote for your features, but also leave comments about why the features are important to you and in what scenarios you’d use them. Watch for us to put out polls and other posts asking for feedback and suggestions too.