Update: RIA Services gone gold with version 1.0 (late May 2010)

RIA Services is a step-change from WCF and for those migrating to internet-hosted data access frameworks. Since RIA only came of age following its release with Silverlight 4 and the significant enhancements to VS2010 that support it, it’s safe to say that it isn’t the most familiar animal to many.
Various show-tours seem to parade endlessly on the net showing carefully choreographed walk-throughs of tightly scripted RIA services handling – ‘Just drag the data source you like onto the canvas and lo, a datagrid miraculously binds itself to the necessary data’. And hey, here’s a Pager that cleverly knows to share the same data source. And look, no code – XAML rules. Well, yes but it all gets a bit ’samey’ after a time and once you start tackling a real-world task, you find that the showy stage show is just that – an act.
Now, to be fair, RIA Services is here to stay and that’s a good thing. However, taken with Entity Framework (bye, bye LINQ-to-SQL), a generous update to Silverlight and a crash-course in WCF, RIA Services carries a big stick and it takes some getting used to.
But RIA Services looks like the ‘next best thing’ for data access across the wire. And having had a quick look at WCF, that’s probably a good thing. Naturally, WCF is at the root of it all but RIA acknowledges that we don’t like heavy plumbing and provides a well-balanced abstraction. So having sat through way too many videos and walk-throughs that ever so neatly avoid real code, here is my collection of resources for learning RIA that pick up where that hand-holding leaves off.

• Ronnie Saurenmann – Principal Architect MS has an excellent 45min video on RIA Services. Covering Entity Framework, DomainDataSource, Validation (including custom) and more. Not for the novice but good when you know enough to feel totally lost
• Contoso Book Club – John Papa. Delivered at the SL4 launch keynote, this is a good worked example (source & starter project provided). The post walkthrough while mostly VS2010 tooling-driven, is well annotated and the example itself is rich enough to be credible.
• Building A Data-Driven Expense App with Silverlight 3 – Jonathan Carter and Terry Adams. Sorry, don’t know the authors but this MSDN piece (while pre-RIA RC – and man, MS like to change thing last minute) does an admirable job of walking through the code needed to wire up a DomainContext, looking at the role of Domain Operations in the generated DomainContext class, DomainDataSource objects to project data into new controls (like Data Form) – and they do it in code. Heck, I’ll appreciate the fancy VS2010 control handling later, but not until I understand what going on under the hood.
• WCF RIA Services (MSDN) – Though this refers to pre-release RIA, it looks fine. Maybe I’m maturing but recalling how I recoiled every time I resorted to MSDN, I now find it more appealing. When it comes to a complex, multi-faceted and highly integrated framework like RIA, I really appreciate the carefully crafted (though often clinical) language of the technical writers at MSDN. This doc is very thorough and watch a good few videos before approaching it!
• Silverlight 4 WCF RIA Services Line of Business Application Hands-On Lab – Sascha Corti & Ronnie Saurenmann. Over 100 pages of hands on explanation and guidance, starter & final solutions, published Dec ‘09 so targets SL4 – this is complete, thorough and well-written.