Microsoft released the March preview of the .NET RIA Services framework. This framework aims to simplify the n-tier application pattern for ASP.NET hosted Silverlight applications. The March preview is the first release of this framework and was released and presented at MIX09.
There were two sessions where the presenters were talking about this new framework:
There is also an interview with Brad and Nikhil on the .NET Rocks web site.
Brad Adams has a blog entry which is a quick overview of what the .NET RIA Services framework tries to accomplish but I think that the walkthrough and overview document you can download from the Microsoft site, will give you a better sense of the potential of the framework.
Currently the code generation and plumbing features are a little rigid as the Silverlight project in Visual Studio creates a link to the ASP.NET hosting project which helps in facilitating the proxy generation and plumbing. It also works only with the Entity Framework as the interaction layer with the data source.
As a first step it looks like a promising framework but there is still a long way to go.
Software Requirements
All that you need is Visual Studio 2008 SP1 or Visual Studio Express 2008 SP1 and the .NET RIA Services Framework.
Downloads
You can download the walkthrough / overview document as well as the installation package for the framework here.
Samples
There are also some sample projects you can download from MSDN Code gallery last minute updates which missed the rollout of the framework package.
There are so far three how-to articles on the SilverlightShow.net web site: