RIA Services versus WCF Services

Question

I\'m rewriting an LOB application whose architecture is like this:

Silverlight && Windows Mobile -> WCF -> Entity Framework -> Database.

Answer 1

Until there is a formal release of WCF RIA Services, I don't think there is a definitive answer to this question. As of the current Beta (for VS 2008, SL 3), RIA Services does not hide the asynchronous nature of service calls; you still need to provide a callback method. Also, RIA Services does not currently support user-defined classes (or collections of user-defined classes) as either parameters or return values on RIA service calls. I'm also running into trouble providing non-editable entity classes through RIA Services. (The error says the entity collection isn't editable. Yeah, that is actually what I want....)

At this point, I need to fall back and take another look at making plain old WCF work. That's not so simple, given the size of the application we're developing, but it seems to be the workable solution until MS fixes some of the current problems with RIA Services.