RIA Services updates for //build

At //build, Dinesh Kulkarni from our team gave a presentation alongside Asad Khan from the OData team.  They showed RIA/JS consuming both a RIA Services DomainService as well as an OData feed from Azure.  Dinesh also showed RIA/JS working in the browser, in a Win8 Metro Style app, and on an iPhone using PhoneGap.  You can watch their talk on Channel 9.

To coincide with their talk, the RIA Services team published updates for RIA/JS:

• Updated RIAServices.jQuery NuGet package
• New RIAServices.jQuery.Sample NuGet package
• WCF RIA Services Toolkit (September 2011)
• New RIA/JS landing page: http://win8.ms/riajs

RIAServices.jQuery

We are favoring NuGet over the MSI for toolkit components, as we can update the packages independently and more quickly.

• $.observable for data editing / change events – This is a prototype implementation of an observability pattern we’re working with the jQuery and jQuery UI teams on, following the pattern we’ve established with $.dataSource.
• Query data from OData services – We’re now able to load / query / mash-up data from OData sources.
• $.dataSource IntelliSense – You’ll now find detailed API guidance from the $.dataSource IntelliSense
• Simpler packaging / JavaScript classes/namespaces – RIA/JS now only has a single JavaScript file: ria.js.  It contains classes like DataSource, DataContext, et al, and we’ve refined how we define classes and namespaces to follow common jQuery patterns.

RIAServices.jQuery.Sample

Following the lead of the Entity Framework team, we’ve created a NuGet package that adds sample code into your project for using RIA/JS.  This is a great way to temporarily add sample code into your project, learn from it, and then uninstall it once you’ve implemented your own scenarios.  Give it a try!

WCF RIA Services Toolkit (September 2011)

The Toolkit has been updated to have the same content as the RIAServices.jQuery package.  There were no other updates to the Toolkit in this release.  You can always find the latest toolkit here: http://jeffh.me/riatoolkit.

This Toolkit build works with both WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 and the SP2.

Version Compatibility

With all of these new releases flying all around, it’s hard to know what works where. Hopefully this helps:

At the time of WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2 RC, Visual Studio 11 is not yet supported.  This is mostly because of our design-time components, and we are working to get that in place to offer VS11 support as soon as possible--stay tuned for updates therein.

As you can see above, if you are building Silverlight 4 applications, you can use RIA Services V1.0 SP1 or SP2.  If you are developing Silverlight 5 applications though, you must use RIA Services V1.0 SP2.