For those of you who have not know about Microsoft’s solution to the N-Tier system, you should hurry up and learn more about it. Its already been months old with two public releases (Preview versions).

Microsoft calls it .NET RIA services. What the hell is it and how is it different from traditional 2-tier and 3-tier systems?

Microsoft .NET RIA Services simplifies the traditional n-tier application pattern by bringing together the ASP.NET and Silverlight platforms. The RIA Services provides a pattern to write application logic that runs on the mid-tier and controls access to data for queries, changes and custom operations. It also provides end-to-end support for common tasks such as data validation, authentication and roles by integrating with Silverlight components on the client and ASP.NET on the mid-tier.

I have posted some links below to help get familiarize with .NET RIA services.

Installing July 2009 preview: Download the installer from here. (Prerequisites: Visual Studio 2008SP1 or Visual Web Developer SP1 and Silverlight 3.0 Runtime,SDK and Tools. You are required to uninstall March / May 2009 Preview before installing the newer version.

More information/tutorials on it can be found at

1. http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/RiaServices
2. http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/what-is-net-ria-services.aspx
3. http://silverlight.net/forums/t/108916.aspx
4. http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/2009/04/04/build-a-simple-application-with-net-ria-services-silverlight-3.aspx
5. http://www.silverlightshow.net/items/Creating-applications-with-.NET-RIA-Service-Part-1-Introduction.aspx
6. http://blogs.microsoft.co.il/blogs/bursteg/archive/tags/.Net+RIA+Services/default.aspx

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For some of you out there who have been working on wpf or silverlight, you must have known the codename of Silverlight – WPF/E. It stood for WPF Everywhere, meaning, WPF could run on any platform or Operating System. Well the same applies to .NET also which I like to refer to it as .Net/E (just kidding). Even this project has similar goals. Its not about other .NET frameworks or engines like mono or portable.net, but rather takes a total different approach to making .NET apps run everywhere.

Unlike those traditional frameworks mentioned earlier, Mainsoft Grasshopper, takes a totally different approach by converting .NET codes to Java bytecode, thus allowing the code to run everywhere the Java runtime is installed. Since Java Runtime is installed in many of our computers, especially non Microsoft OS, our code could run on more platforms and OS without telling the user to install the mono framework. ( you need to provide easy access to the customers). To summarize, it about running your .NET code anywhere Java works. That’s a face to face challenge with Java.

For more details please have a look at it official website here.

You can download the plug-in for visual studio from following links. I’m just providing these links as alternatives.

For Visual Studio 2008 (52.8 mb) [Downloads: 3239]
For Visual Studio 2005 (56.7 mb) [Downloads: 1101]
For Visual Studio 2003 (58.9 mb) [Downloads: 399]

I have also been working on a similar project for my bachelors degree, which I posted on my blog out here. Its about converting C# code to a portable code called LLVM that can be compiled and run in almost all sorts of platforms. For more information please check the official site of my project at http://projects.prabir.me/compiler.

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