I heard that with my last blog post that announced the December 2010 Toolkit release, there was some confusion about our Product vs. Toolkit.  I have added clarification to that post, but I wanted to put out another post dedicated to clearing up any confusion I caused.

Up until now, the WCF RIA Services team has always published 2 installers with each release:

  1. The actual “Product” bits – What gets installed as WCF RIA Services (with a specific version number)
  2. The additional “Toolkit” bits – What gets installed as WCF RIA Services Toolkit

The Product installer is where our official product features reside.  This includes our core .NET and Silverlight assemblies such as the LinqToEntitiesDomainService and the Silverlight DomainDataSource control.  The Toolkit is where we’ve put features that we want to distribute but that don’t (yet?) make the cut for being part of the official product.  This is where you’ll find our experimental T4 Code Generation feature, the Windows Azure Table Storage integration, the LinqToSqlDomainService, and the ASP.NET DomainDataSource control.

We have a lot more agility within the Toolkit and we’ve always said internally that we could put out Toolkit releases more frequently than the Product, but until now we’ve never actually put out a Toolkit release that didn’t have a corresponding Product release.  For the December 2nd Silverlight Firestarter event, we broke that trend and published a new Toolkit release alone. This Toolkit release is still built on top of the WCF RIA Services V1.0 SP1 Beta Product release from October.  If you aren’t yet using the SP1 Beta release, you can read more about it in my post that was published during PDC 10.

Latest Releases

RIA Services Team Blogs

I recently added a RIA Services Team Blogs list to the right side of my blog.  Our blogs are honestly one of the best places to find information about the features within both our Product and Toolkit.  Here’s the list of team members that have blogs:

 

I hope this all helps!