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

Working with metadata (and writing it by yourself) is really pain in the ass. Especially when you need to update your model. RIA tutorial applications look quite well on a small database but working with a model consisting of dozens of entites, you'll spend more time updating metadata than programming the application itself. This is also connected with definition of validation and all the validation and description messages on properties from resources. But we have created some T4 templates so it all gets generated automatically.

On the other hand, we're using RIA on two projects and I must say it's the best we can get. We had some troubles with validation but it can be solved (validating before checking whether the property value has changed). And once you are aware of memory management with RIA (you don't want to load the whole databse into memory on client etc.), it can be used in real life.

Unfortunately, there is no silver bullet, so if you, for example, plan other clients than your SL app to connect to the server, you should probably watch somewhere else (WCP Data Services, maybe?). Or if you don't want to update data from your client, I see RIA as overkill.

Answer 2

I have written a post in my Blog about Ria WCF Data Services, and WCF Rest Service using also some of the conclusions reached here it is here.