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 have been using SL4 + EF for our enterprise development and I found it, it is hard to develop with EF if you go with the default out of box development model. What I mean by that is, any screen you develop, for the data you use EF with a table/view then very quickly the your model get blotted. After adding 20 new pages with 6 to 10 tables/views now it is very difficult to add entities in the edmx. I personally do not like the blotting. If you see some of the questions I have asked and based on the answers it seems for enterprise level development do not use stright out of the box EF features instead, create a domain model using POCO with PI and then use that to develop your application. I have not completed one successfully yet so I do not have personal result on this. One another thing, I noticed it is not related EF per se instead SL itself. Spend some time and understand either PRISM/MEF/Caliburn and use that create your application. One of the problem I do not like in SL is testability, even though SL unit testing is there, it itself is not a good unit testing framework. Also testing EF is not breeze either. With PRISM/MEF/Caliburn not only testing is easy and also your development will be truly modular. So before you start your development, my recommendation is to look at one of the framework and instead of using EF outof box, use POCO to create your domain model and then use POCO to use it in SL. Hope this helps.