Is RIA Services right for our Silverlight app at this point?

Question

Hi,

I'm looking at Silverlight architectures and RIA Services looks interesting, but I am a bit concerned about its prelease status and how the feature set will change.

We need our client app to be as responsive as possible over a slow network link, so a high priority is a solid sync system for pushing model state changes from the client back to the server. Will RIA Services help us in this regard or will I have to roll my own logic to do this ? Are there any other frameworks that can assist with this? Is the feature set involved in these requirements liable to change much in the next couple of months?

If it makes any difference, our frontend is 100% Silverlight, so we dont need to worry about exposing SOAP APIs from the server or anything like that. It appears to me that RIA so far is a bit more mature for Silverlight use. Is this correct?

Answer 1

I am using SL 3, .NET RIA and EF. Still trying to figure out how to load, and update data effectively and best in performance. Little information that I have so far how to improve the performance issue that I face. Still need more time to get these frameworks to be mature. Hopefully, there are more resources and insight in the near future.

My take is if you are handling very light data application, silverlight can be a good choice. Once you have loaded the application in to your machine, it is like loading application within your box.