Silverlight and RIA Service without ASP.NET

Question

Hi,

I'm pretty new to Silverlight/RIA/Asp.Net thing, and I'm trying to figure if an Asp.Net website is required (for hosting the app) if I wish to use RIA services with Silverlight?

Answer 1

You could use a Web Application for hosing the RIA services in which is a compiled version of a Web Site. This is a distinction made by Visual Studio for different types of web projects but that might not be what you mean.

Really though RIA is just web service that takes a certain set of parameters. You technically could use PHP and generate the same content although that seems like it might be a bit of work unless there are frameworks that already do this.

Your RIA service will need to live somewhere online though. You don't need a website with web pages but you will need to run the service in a web server like IIS and that means it probably needs to live in a web site, even if the website doesn't have any web pages.

Answer 2

No, you can not use RIA services without an ASP.NET application. While it is true that you can create the backend data service with PHP (or a number of other web technologies), that would not be making use of RIA services.

The basic idea of RIA services is to provide a super simply means of plumbing your data classes through ASP.NET. Mostly it is used in conjunction with an ORM and additional metadata classes in your web application. You then provide a service to manipulate your data. When you compile the solution than the work you did in the web project gets pushed into your Silverlight application (through code generation).