ASP.NET together with WCF Data Services or WCF Data Services

Question

Makes it sense to use ASP.NET togehter with WCF RIA Services or WCF Data Services ? Or are these technologies/frameworks only proper for Silverlight primarily ?

Answer 1

You can use RIA Services with ASP.NET, for example with DomainDataSource server control, or from an MVC controller.

The key thing is a DomainService in RIA Services encapsulates business logic in a presentation-tier neutral sense. It can be exposed as a service to Silverlight and Ajax apps, or it can be used by asp.net to do server-side rendering.

For example, a scenario is that of generating sitemaps and downlevel-rendering for SEO purposes, even if the presentation is silverlight-based. Both of these build on a domain service to share business logic.

Hope that helps.