RIA Services versus WCF services: what is a difference

Question

There are a lot of information how to build Silverlight application using .NET RIA services, but it isn\'t clear what is unique thing in RIA that is absent in WCF?

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Answer 1

Actually, you can use the same validation and authentication without using RIA Services. What RIA Services gives you is code generation. It creates your classes for you. You only need to put the business logic. I think RIA Services is very useful for developing small to mid apps very rapidly.

Another difference is that it hides the asynchronous calls to the web service. Many people don't like the async model (which is the only one you can use in Silverlight) and RIA services handles that for you.

I recommend reading this article from Shawn Wildermuth where he points out the pros and cons from both approaches and also includes ADO.NET data services (which is now called WCF Data Services, I think):

http://wildermuth.com/2009/09/29/Choosing_a_Data_Access_Layer_for_Silverlight_3