As Silverlight 4 was pushed from Beta to Release Candidate stage earlier this month, Microsoft also made available adjacent developer resources, including a new version of WCF RIA Services. And because it is accompanying the RC of Silverlight 4, Windows Communication Foundation is also available as an RC build, Nicholas Allen, a program manager at Microsoft working on Windows Communication Foundation, Windows Workflow Foundation, Silverlight, and other projects for the .NET Framework, notes.
.NET developers running the latest build of Microsoft Visual Studio 2010, which coincidentally is also the RC, can now integrate an add-on and pre-requisite files with the platform, to streamline the building of Silverlight 4 and RIA Services applications
“RIA Services are an application design pattern that lives between ASP.NET and Silverlight in a multi-tier architecture. Inside RIA Services you can host application logic for data access control, queries, and other data operations. Integration with Silverlight components and controls allows for data validation and access control to automatically be made available to the client,” Allen revealed.
By downloading the Silverlight 4 Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 RC, .NET developers will in fact get access to a number of components, including the Silverlight 4 developer runtime RC, Silverlight 4 SDK (software development kit) RC, the update for Visual Studio 2010 RC and Visual Web Developer Express 2010 RC (KB976272), Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC and WCF RIA Services for Silverlight 4 RC.
“The WCF RIA Services toolkit contains additional features that are not part of the main product. Included in the March 2010 toolkit are better service integration with LINQ, custom endpoints for exposing RIA services using SOAP and JSON, and an ASP.NET control for connecting to a RIA service,” Allen added.
WCF RIA Services Release Candidate is available for download here
WCF RIA Services Toolkit March 2010 is available for download here
Silverlight 4 Tools for Visual Studio 2010 RC are available for download here
Silverlight 4 SDK Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here
Silverlight 4 Release Candidate (RC) Build 4.0.50303.0 is available for download here
The Silverlight 4 Training Kit is available for download here
Visual Studio 2010 Premium Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here
Visual Studio 2010 Professional Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here
Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here
.NET Framework 4 Release Candidate (RC) is available for download here