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 am really disappointed about MS. As it is obvious from the discussion about this topic, I am not the only one who sometimes gets confused by all the "tools" we are provided by MS. The problem is that really miss some managing and coordination from MS.

The result is that there are very similar products with similar functionality where one does one thing better and the other another one. And no one can tell which one is better to use or even which one will be supported in the next version.

I have two examples.

1. Entity Framework vs. Linq to SQL in .net 3.5 These were very similar, both did the same. L2S was meant to be better for smaller projects, EF for enterprise ones. L2S had much better designer and better LINQ implementation. EF was supposed to be able to map more database tables to one entity but this never worked really well. And, by the way, even EF4 does not have a very useful feature of L2S that is AssociateWith<> function. And suddenly, L2S is no longer supported and everyone should use EF. There should be someone who at the very beginning said "Stop, we have two similar technologies. Let get the two teams together and make one product with the best of both.".

2. RIA services vs. WCF Data services Again, the same problem. Two distinct teams working on two similar products. Both with some better features tham the other. But definitely, there could be one product with the features of both.

How should we decide which one to use (besides spending a lot of time to mastering both)? Which one will be deprecated?

...this is probably for a blog post, not answer here. Sorry, I just needed to write it somewhere and since there was a lot of talk about these issues, it seemed as a proper place. I will definitely try to blog about it later.