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Microsoft WCF RIA Services 1.0 SP2 is a framework designed to simplify the development of n-tier Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), primarily targeting Microsoft Silverlight clients backed by .NET mid-tier services. The core architectural goal of WCF RIA Services is to eliminate the tedious “plumbing” code usually required to pass data, validation rules, and business logic between a server and a separate client application.

The Service Pack 2 (SP2) update specifically focused on delivering native compatibility for Silverlight 5 alongside Silverlight 4, supporting DateTimeOffset, and enabling Entity Framework Code-First setups. The N-Tier Architectural Problem & RIA’s Solution

In a standard n-tier architecture, a developer has to write data entities on the server, create a web service (like raw WCF) to expose them, handle serialization, and rewrite or duplicate those same entity classes and validation logic on the client. HowTo: Access a WCF RIA DomainService from a WPF client