Silverlight, RIA Services, and Your Business Objects - Deborah's Developer MindScape

With RIA Services, it is easy to use your own business objects in your Silverlight application… once you have the basic plumbing in place. However, there are quite a few steps required to set up that plumbing. This post details the process of hooking up your business objects, RIA Services, and Silverlight.

So … you follow best practices and build business objects for all of the entities involved in your application. Or maybe you generate those business objects with something like Entity Framework (EF), Linq to SQL or other similar tool. In any case, you now want to use those business objects from a Silverlight application.

Seems like it should be easy, right? Just define a reference from your Silverlight application to your business object component and proceed just like with your WinForms or ASP.NET application. But no.

Silverlight does not allow you to set a reference to a non-Silverlight component. There are a number of ways you can deal with this:

1. Use a Silverlight class library project type and build your business objects in there. Not a good solution if you are using those same business objects with other user interfaces.
   
2. Build a WCF service that provides your business objects to your Silverlight application. You can find out more about this option here.
   
3. Use Rich Internet Application (RIA) Services. This is a new Microsoft technology that is currently out in preview.

This post demonstrates option #3: Using RIA Services. The example presented in this post uses business objects you build yourself. These "home made" business objects are often referred to as POCO, or plain old CLR objects. Use the techniques presented in this post any time you start a new Silverlight application and want to access your POCOs from that application.

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