Silverlight TV 56: WCF RIA Services and Azure

I think, when this goes RTM, Saurabh should come back and shows how the RTM builds and publishes again.

Although unrelated to this TV show (directly), but we really need to get a better picture for the pricing on Azure when deploying RIA and using Azure SQL.

I also need to find out if Azure SQL supports FileStream.

..Ben

GREAT
So THX

There is a SP1 beta for RIA available now. However, this Azure support seem to be a CTP as of now. Is the Azure support going to be part of SP1 RTM?

..Ben

This is still too much effort to do. And besides, that Saurabh Pant for me as a dutch guy, is a bit hard to follow. He talks sometimes like a machine gun, so I missed some of his explanation. Even after seeing this video several times.
Whatever, the deployment of a wcf ria application to the cloud should be made easier.

Nice video!  Since RIA is still relatively new to some of us, these videos help.  However, all the videos and tutorials that I have seen on WCF RIA so far only show editing of simple textboxes in a DataGrid or DataForm.  Almost all REAL WORLD applications require the use of ComboBoxes or some type of drop down to choose from a list of allowed string options.  If you search for this on the web, and there are a LOT of posts, almost everyone runs into a brick wall.  Why is this not in any of the tutorials.  We can't continue to convince management that Silverlight 4 RIA is the right choice when it is so difficult to implement common scenarios.

Thanks, and please schedule a tutorial/video on the use of ComboBoxes in DataForms.

Hello there,

I'm a bit confused about the whole "Azure" platform...

We think in terms of SAAS right ? (Software As a Service).

So, with the SilverLight Bizz template, we get the stuff we need to be on the "Cloud", because
"Cloud" only means hosting your resources to a server in one or more (distributed) DataCenters, running
the Web-Part and Database on 1 / more Web/App Servers.

So, or Web App contains our model, entity mapping framework and connection to the Database.
DomainServices on the Web Part request data from the EF context and  return them as IQueryable<T> objects
to the Client (which holds a proxy to those Domain Services).

Finally, when we deploy our LOB (Line Of Business) application to the DataCenter (which is a synonyme for
"the cloud" to me), our Data, Validation and so on runs on "The Cloud", and our client-pc request data
to the exposed "proxy" of the Domain Service. So this is real SAAS to me, I don't understand what the AZURE
technology brings as surplus, aren't we adding extra complexity here ? can you explain please ?

Thx

Emmanuel Nuytttens.
.NET Architect
BELGIUM

@COcoder
We touched on some of those issues in Episode 52 (http://channel9.msdn.com/Shows/SilverlightTV/Silverlight-TV-52-Entity-Level-Validation-Defining-MetaData-and-Nested-ComboBoxes-with-WCF-RIA-Servi). Here's the post I wrote to go along with it (http://blogs.msdn.com/b/kylemc/archive/2010/11/12/silverlight-tv-52-ria-services-q-a.aspx). Feel free to contact me (via my blog) if you have any questions.

@emnu71: 

The biggest value of Azure that I see is its ease of management, deployment and ability to easily scale thus its ability to supply as much capacity as your applications/users demand.  

For example, say you had business application that was seasonal, and in great demand for only a few months of the year, now think of the hassles and costs of not only provisioning this within your own data center, but also ensuring your application could properly leverage additional servers, multi-core CPUs, etc. 

As a developer within Azure, you are isolated from these concerns which allows you instead to concentrate on the business requirements and application functionality. 

Azure provides a composite set of complex services such as Caching, Identity Management plus a whole lot more that are otherwise complex areas to build, scale and integrate into LOBs, but are instead very easy and prescriptive within Azure.  With caching, think session state, think of the complexity of managing session state across multple web servers, with Azure you no longer have to worry about that, its all handled for you as a service, you can choose to leverage (for a low runtime fee) or build yourself.

Queue storage for example, is an excellent way to provide messaging capabilities between decoupled roles. As an example, you could choose to spin up 300 worker role instances to process messages which execute complex business logic and say those messages are coming from 200 web roles which are load balanced across many data centers, but then when the demand goes away, you are able to turn that down to say 3 worker roles handling messages from only 2 web roles.  This is a very simple configuration change you can make in a matter of minutes through the Azure dashboard (which as was pointed out in this video, is SilverLight and WCF RIA services).  Think of the cost for you if you had to provide that in-house, to not only provision that scenario, but the complexities associated to building that into your applications to take advantage of scale.

Azure Queue, Blob and Table storage are very easy to use and with Content Delivery Network (CDN) turned on, you can push your Blob content close to your target audience with a simple flip of a switch.  

SQL Azure makes it easy to migrate and leverage SQL as we do today, except its running on your own VM as part of your composite service offerings. 

Azure is not just a datacenter but rather it is composition of services that you can leverage as part of your LOB design (or not) and it is has a number of ever-growing Enterprise features that make it scale to well beyond the needs of most LOB needs.  

SilverLight and WCF RIA services are excellent technologies that fit very well into Azure. 

I highly recommend that you take some time and complete some of the many Azure SDK as well as WCF RIA Services labs, then revisit this video. I am pretty sure if you do that you
will have many more answers than questions as to why Azure is such an important
platform for developers and the business at large.