Clarification about WCF RIA Services

   A lot as been said about “.NET RIA Services” now called “WCF RIA Services”, and much more about this name change, since many people doesn’t look at RIA Services like a real WCF Services with all their power, but that isn’t quite true since WCF RIA Services use the same bases as WCF but just make the work a little bit easier for us in terms of the “plumbing/low level development” part.

   One of the Product Team members, in this case Saurabh Pant in his blog talked about this and why the change, and clarifies the WCF inside WCF RIA Services in this blog post. He also talks about the motivation of this alignment between the WCF and the RIA Services Team, and in this blogs post the .NET Connected Framework Team explain the entire ecosystem for WCF and in which WCF RIA Services is part of. Check the following picture to know more about this ecosystem that has technologies like:

• WCF Core Services
  • The most commonly known WCF implementation
• WCF WebHttp/AJAX Services
  • The RESTful WCF service implementation
• WCF Data Services
  • The previously known ADO.NET Data Services are now also using WCF for all the communication
• WCF Workflow Services
  • Workflows that are exposed and interact as WCF Services
• WCF RIA Services
  • The previously know .NET RIA Services that now use the WCF communication capabilities in order to provide more power to the developer and at the same time, easier development and less “plumbing”

  Hope this helps clarify a little better the WCF part of the WCF RIA Services and their place in the entire WCF ecosystem.