On December 9, 2011, Silverlight 5 was released.  As always, RIA Services is included in the Tools for Silverlight, and this new release included our V1.0 SP2 final build.  We refer to this as our RTW build, meaning Released-To-Web.  In addition to the Tools installer including WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP2, you can also find the standalone installer on Microsoft Download Center.  The silverlight.net/getstarted/riaservices page was also updated to reflect the new release.

Aside from some bug fixes here and there, not much changed between SP2 RC and SP2 RTW.  The primary focus as been ensuring really solid compatibility with both Silverlight 5 and Silverlight 4 with this release, and testing the bits on tons of configurations for both design-time and runtime.  If you are upgrading from V1.0 SP1 to V1.0 SP2 though, here’s what you’ll find in this release:

  1. Support for both Silverlight 4 and Silverlight 5 (SP1 had subtle issues that would cause bugs in SL5 apps)
  2. DateTimeOffset support
  3. Entity Framework Code-First development, using this NuGet package

There are some more details in my SP2 RC announcement.

Known issues include:

  1. Entity Framework 4.1 is required, but version 4.2 isn’t supported yet
  2. Requires Visual Studio 2010 or SP1. Visual Studio 11 isn’t supported yet
  3. Work on supporting Universal Providers for improved Windows Azure deployment is ongoing
  4. If you want to create a Silverlight 4 Business Application Template, first create an instance of the Silverlight 5 template, and then use the Silverlight project properties to retarget it to Silverlight 4. You might see some temporary errors (System.Windows.Markup.XamlParseException) in the designer and error window, but rebuilding will make those disappear.

I want to send a shout out to Yavor Georgiev and point you to his blog, as he has been driving this SP2 RTW release for the last couple of months.  I’ve transitioned off of the WCF RIA Services team and over to ASP.NET Web Pages, NuGet, and Razor.

If you have any questions or issues with the SP2 release, jump over to the forums.