What are the pitfalls of using .NET RIA Services in Silverlight?

Question

Silverlight can use WCF, Web Services, REST based services, .NET RIA Services, but it seems like Silverlight and .NET RIA Services are preferred most.

I want to know if

Answer 1

I've been using RIA-Services for a few months and a couple of differen apps and found that I can get it to do pretty much everything I need. It saves you a LOT of time by using clever code-generation to take care of a lot of the plumbing.

It is best used if you're creating a straight forward CRUD application using EF, if that is the case then you should be fine.

If you're doing something a little different then it take a little bit more work but it still is (in my opinion) the best option for getting data to your silverlight client. There are some small annoyances but no show stoppers that I've found.

For example, I've used it with SQL Credentials (user logs into Silverlight app using their SQL login and I dynamically create connection string using the username + password). This took a little bit more work but it works fine.

I've also used it to return data to the client from Stored Procedures rather than from Entities, again this takes a bit more work but it works fine.