Dan Wahlin

nead23: Glad you enjoyed the presentation. I'd definitely like to make some more videos on the topics you mention....I'll see what I can get done there in the future.

Thanks SlamminSammy....appreciate it.

EzaBlade: That would be possible since WCF RIA Services exposes a WCF .svc file under the covers that could be called by other clients. Whether you want to use that is up to you though. If you break out your code into a separate class (as I mention in the talk) then it would be pretty trivial to expose a separate WCF service that still leverages the same code base ultimately if you wanted to secure things differently. 

So, the short answer is, you could potentially use the .svc file exposed by WCF RIA Services or just create a separate WCF service. Your call on that though.

Dan

Claudio:

All of the projects shown in this particular talk were created by using the standard Silverlight Business Application template. From there I added the Entity Framework model and other code. It sounds like you may be referring to one of the labs we created though since some of them have a WCF service project and an EF model in a separate project. Someone else asked about that as well at http://www.silverlight.net/learn/tutorials/silverlight-4/using-the-mvvm-pattern-in-silverlight-applications/ and here was my response:

The Web Service lab was created using the WCF Service Application template in Visual Studio since it was originally used with the Windows Forms and ASP.NET applications shown in Labs 1 and 2. With Silverlight you can go that route or use the Silverlight-enabled WCF Service template shown in the WCF lab. The Silverlight-enabled service automatically adds in binary formatting for you which provides even better performance (see the WCF lab for details on that). The Model (EF) project was created using the Class Library template. 

To reference the project assemblies you can right-click on the project that needs the assembly, select Add Reference and then select the Project tab. It'll show all the projects available to reference and let you select one or more of them as needed.

Dan

Greg,

Sorry to hear you're running into problems. I'd recommend a couple of things:

1. The labs using a database all reference SQLEXPRESS as the database name in the web.config files since that's the default name. Make sure you don't have a SqlExpress database with a different name. If you do you'll need to update the connection string in each lab's web.config file. I'm assuming you have SqlExpress installed but double-check that as well.

2. Post any specific errors you may see in the appropriate lab's comments area (not here though). We've had a lot of people get through the labs successfully but if you're not able to run the solutions then there must be something configured a little bit differently on your machine. Seeing the errors will hopefully help narrow down the issue.

Thanks,
Dan 

Sutikshan: Thanks for making the time to watch it and best of luck with your development. I appreciate your comments.

Glad to hear the excitement over the labs! We had fun building them and filming the videos and hope they serve as a good resource for people interested in getting started with Silverlight development or wanting to enhance their existing skills.