Silverlight TV 74: What's New in RIA Services

Pity you guys didn't release this POCO stuff last month.  You could have saved me a large workaround. Never mind.  Still, this is very handy.  I need to come back to this.  Glad to see the constant stream of improvements comming out.

Could you say a little about serialization and the efficiency of using POCO over RIA Services?  What's going on in terms of the TCP/IP packets?  I like the features (security, attributes, validation), but would like to get a feel for what the trade-offs are.

The comparison is slightly unfair, but lets say we used custom .ashx handlers instead.  What is the overhead assuming we use the same serialization method underneath?

Odd. This doesn't play for me in FF 4 or IE 8. I've watched these videos before.

This video seems to work for me only in mid quality
wmv.

It's video quality is not much good as they said.

I am badly waiting for RIA support on 4.1 model-first (LinqToEntitiesDomainContext<TContext> where TContext : DbContext - is's not supported yet).

Also, you shouldn't have to decorate your POCOs with the nasty Key attributes, the goal is to have generated POCOs that RIA processes and decorates automatically for the client (perhaps via DomainDescriptionProvider).

Anther thing I couldn't come along is how to share interface implementations over the wire, please vote for it.

My wet dream is model-first only, and this should generate database (should have more options), server entities, auto-decorated client DTOs that implement interfaces generated from POCOs (undecorated at all) + full MVVM support (i.e. relaxed while very extesible data manipulation controls for the VMs that can be (or not) exposed to the Views)

The Silverlight video's quality is a shame!
Please get it better!

The T4 process as described in this video doesn't work. Have some settings or extra steps been glossed over? Is there somewhere I can find a more comprehensive example?

@daveoggy - Here is a more detailed example http://varunpuranik.wordpress.com/2010/11/05/t4-code-generator-extensibility/

Thanks Deepesh. The detailed example was written in December 2010 so I assume against the older toolkit? Has anything changed since then in the April release?

Edit: To answer my own question it seems that the <RiaClientCodeGeneratorName> tag in the project file is no longer required.

It also looks like the step missing from the video above is the creation of this class:

    [DomainServiceClientCodeGenerator("MyCustomGenerator", "C#")]
    class MyCSharpClientCodeGenerator : CSharpClientCodeGenerator
    {
        protected override DomainContextGenerator DomainContextGenerator
        {
            get
            {
                return new MyDomainContextGenerator();
            }
        }
    }

Was this just forgotten or is this requirement also supposed to have been removed?

Hi Deepesh,
Loved this demo but tough to see the code. Do you have the code to download so we can open it and follow along better?
Thanks!

@Lori - i will clean up the code and put it up in a different location. Are you looking for a particular sample? Maybe i could send that to you earlier.