RIA Services versus WCF Services

Question

I\'m rewriting an LOB application whose architecture is like this:

Silverlight && Windows Mobile -> WCF -> Entity Framework -> Database.

Answer 1

Ria services are created just to be used with Silverlight. They are substantially a standard "package" ready to be used by Silverlight. The advantage is that you have a lot of services without need to write code i.e.:

1. Support for data annotations
2. Support for membership provider and login
3. Support for transferring to silverlight server side generated exceptions. There is a difficulty in silverlight that make difficultthe normal error transfer of exception through FaultContract. The point is that the browser is not able to handle all error codes. Ria services solve this with a trick

All things done by Ria can be done with WCF and with other available software and in particular with Wcf data services. For instance for data annotations I found this library that do a better job than Ria services, support for membership just require activating the already existing membership endpoint of a WCF service, and finally the exception problem is easily resolved by writing a WCF behaviour. Code is available here:http://www.silverlightshow.net/Storage/10Tips.zip The point is that with Ria Service you have all this in a mouse click!. On the other side Ria Services are really difficult to customize...so if you don't like the standard solution they offer you simply can't use them