Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

By : David Burela
Book Image

Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration

By: David Burela

Overview of this book

Microsoft Silverlight is a powerful development platform for creating rich media applications and line of business applications for the web and desktop. Microsoft Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting, and service management environment for the Windows Azure platform. Silverlight allows you to integrate with Windows Azure and create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure This book shows you how to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on Windows Azure. Integrating Silverlight and Windows Azure can be difficult without guidance. This book will take you through all the steps to create and run Silverlight Enterprise Applications on the Windows Azure platform. The book starts by providing the steps required to set up the development environment, providing an overview of Azure. The book then dives deep into topics such as hosting Silverlight applications in Azure, using Azure Queues in Silverlight, storing data in Azure table storage from Silverlight, accessing Azure blob storage from Silverlight, relational data with SQL Azure and RIA, and manipulating data with RIA services amongst others.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Microsoft Silverlight 5 and Windows Azure Enterprise Integration
Credits
About the Author
Acknowledgement
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface

Chapter 8. RIA Services and SQL Azure

The previous chapter on using SQL Azure with WCF services involved a lot of code being handwritten. Methods to expose each data type (Employee and Division) needed to be created, as well as the individual methods to allow the client to create new entities. The WCF methods also did not make it easy to query a subset of data.

RIA Services helps developers to be more productive by simplifying data access between the server and client. This chapter will explore the following topics:

  • RIA Services

  • Using Silverlight with RIA Services, SQL Azure, and Entity Framework

RIA Services

RIA Services is a framework that simplifies the process of building enterprise applications on the Silverlight platform. It makes it easy for a Silverlight client to query data on a server (from a database or other data store) and for the client to create, edit, and delete the data. RIA Services also provides additional features such as allowing validation rules to be defined that are run...