I am developing some Silverlight 3 applications. After some research I decided not to use .NET RIA services in my development.

Besides, I am never confident enough to implement operation oriented security when using those RESTful stuff.

Let's say there is a table in database. In some operation context, a certain user is denied to access the data in that table. But in some other operation context, he should be allowed to access some data in that table together with some others from elsewhere. It can be done very easily by using SOAP services becuase SOAP services are strongly operation oriented.

My question is: is that also very easy to do the similar things in REST services?

My feeling is that REST services are very data oriented. Although I am pretty sure it is feasible, but the required effort on setting or coding is obvously bigger than that with SOAP services because , when architecting the system, you need to be more careful to determine data accessibility in various operation context and, when developing the system, you need to continuously look back to audit the security in your code.

When I tried .NET RIA Services including its UserService, I didn't have much better feeling than what I mentioned above. So finally I decided not to use it in development at all in near future.

I think the most useful thing that .NET RIA Services can do is converting Web developers, especially those ASP.NET developers into RIA developers. Web developers are used to finishing their jobs by finishing web front-ends on server side. The biggest issue for them to change to developing RIAs is RIA development normally requires writing more codes to handle the communication between server side and client side. In that case, .NET RIA Services really saves time and is very attractive to them.

I am on hold wih .NET RIA Services. It costs to much time to find walkarounds. Finally when a it comes to RTM - it costs again to make all changes. And dont forget- Services are the stable layer of an application. Changes there are the most expensive part.
btw seems IE8 save doenst work

Shawn,

I've been working on a medium-sized website using.net RIA services. The website has been under construction for a while, but was done in HTML.I have changed the backend to use .net RIA services which provides a nice consistent n-tier development system in both the HTML and Silverlight versions of the site. An HTML version will be available for the publicly accessible areas of the site, and areas where you have to login etc. will be only available in Silverlight. What I love about .net RIA services is that I use the same backend for both HTML and Silverlight.

I've found fewer bugs in .net RIA services than I've found in Silverlight 3 RTW, so I'm pretty happy with their progress at this stage.

...Stefan

Stefan,

I never meant to paid RIA Services as buggy, only that since its not nearly released that it is going to change over time and that means refactoring it.

Shawn,

Certainly there are some changes. Cost me about a day to upgrade to the July release. I would imagine as we get closer there will be fewer changes required. Even with some extra time to make these changes, it is still a substantially more productive platform than any other option for database access using Silverlight.

I just wish I could use it on my WPF projects, even if the database access is local, it's just so nice to have an n-tier system, it makes development so much cleaner that doesn't have the duplication work of traditional n-tier systems.

...Stefan

I've used RIA Services for several projects since the first preview. Seems they're doing a good job on it. As with moving from SL2 to SL3, there are breaking changes in moving from one RIA preview to the next. These aren't show stoppers in either case.