<< Traditional architecture makes me flinch | Home | Say hello to Uber Prof >>

A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services

Illustration 3There are some things that I just don’t understand, and the decision to name two apparently different technologies working in the same area using those two names is one of them.

The image on the right is from In Search Of Stupidity, an excellent and funny book, which talks about a lot of marketing mistakes that software, dedicate a whole chapter for this error.

Coming back to WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services, I read this page, and I am still confused. It appears that the major difference in that RIA services will generate the Silverlight client classes as part of the build process, where as using Data Services this is a separate process.

And I am not sure even of that.

Print | posted on Sunday, February 07, 2010 12:00 PM

Feedback

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 12:12 PM Steve Py

The last paragraph should answer "Why RIA?" It's a simplified model aimed specifically at Silverlight. You can use WCF, or SOAP services, but RIA automatically meets all of the hoops to jump through for SL.

The annoying thing as with any technology aimed at simplifying the 80th percentile of cases, discovering how to fit in something from the 20th remaining percentile can often exceed the effort of learning to use a more bare-bones technology.

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 12:18 PM Diego Mijelshon

Well, considering this comes from the same company that uses cool codenames like "Indigo" and "Avalon" and then releases them as "WCF" and "WPF" (WTF?!)... I'm not surprised at all.
Remember the whole ".net" branding madness around 2002/2003?

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 12:24 PM Frans Bouma

Isn't one of them renamed to OData? If not, I'm with you in the confused camp ;)

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 2:40 PM Frank Quednau

Excellent picture!
It seems as if in software there is often a huge mismatch between the people who created the product and the ones who have to create the content to sell it.

Can they answer questions like "What is the target group?" and "What are the benefits of using product X"? Maybe the marketing guys don't have a frikkin' clue what product X is all about? Maybe the devs are unwilling to put a little thought into what they are producing.

I'd think that in every big company you'll always run into the trouble of solving a problem twice or more times. Since effort has been spent, all outcomes may have to be sold, which is confusing at best and deterring at worst ("they don't know themselves which of their product is the right one for me").

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 3:05 PM Darrel Miller

WCF Data Services is "Astoria" used to support the OData "protocol" which is basically Atom Pub + query conventions + EDMX metadata endpoint + EDM payload.

WCF RIA Services is using "Astoria" to remote an IDataService interface to a Silverlight client. It's RPC CRUD over Http complete with client side proxy objects.

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 3:06 PM tobi

#fail

ef: #fail

management developing linq2sql and ef in parallel: #fail

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 3:51 PM Demis Bellot

From my understanding,
- DataServices 'exposes your data' - by making it accessible over open protocols. So it's useful in reporting, ETL and data warehousing scenarios; whereas
- WCF RIA Services is designed to 'manage your data' by generating the client proxies required for standard CRUD operations on your models. So it's useful for developers building clients to manage the data.

Generally the populace here would want to look at developing with WCF RIA Services.

No doubt there is some overlap in the technologies, but I think it's a necessary split to optimize for both scenarios.
Personally I would hate to build web services operating on the verbose and weakly-typed oData/ATOM protocol.

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/7/2010 6:05 PM Eric Hauser

Frans - OData is a protocol that is implemented by WCF Data Services. It is also implemented by a number of other Microsoft products. Somewhat of a new article: www.infoq.com/.../odata-protocol-collaboration. I believe the next version of SQL Server ships with direct OData support.

Demis - OData is not weakly typed -- the serialization formats that are used with it are: AtomPub and JSON. OData defines a structured model, but also support http://www.odata.org/docs/[MC-EDMX].htm#_Toc246718471

I haven't actually worked with RIA Services, but I would think of it more as a framework while WCF Data Services is the enabling server side technology. Maybe a bad example but RIA Services is to WCF Services as NHibernate is to a RDBMS.

I certainly agree on the bad marketing points.

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/8/2010 2:13 PM Demis Bellot

We'll maybe I'm using the term loosely but when your schema is embedded to fit inside another one (i.e. ATOM) I consider that weakly-typed:
www.odata.org/.../%5BMC-APDSU%5D.htm#_Toc246716692

It is effectively the same as embedding your web service call inside a SOAP envelope, both are just adding another schema layer (i.e. overhead) to hold your data. It may be beneficial for being able to provide tooling to explore and introspect your data, I'm just not a fan of it over pure REST+POX.

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/8/2010 2:41 PM Demis Bellot

We'll maybe I'm using the term loosely, but whenever you have to embed your schema to fit inside another one (i.e. ATOM) I consider it to be weakly-typed.
www.odata.org/.../%5BMC-APDSU%5D.htm#_Toc246716692

It's no different than embedding your web service call inside a SOAP envelope, both are just standardized schemas (i.e. overhead) to hold your data. This may be beneficial to be able to provide automatic tooling to explore and introspect your data, I'm just not a fan of it over pure REST+POX.

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/8/2010 3:11 PM Jack Ukleja

Yes I also found it very confusing.

I a wrote a side-by-side comparison in the hope it would help me understand the "strategy" behind these two products. Unfortunately I am still fairly confused. I suspect the real answer is: there is no was strategy.

Or perhaps more accurately there *was* no strategy, now they are trying to rationalize the two frameworks retrospectively. No bad thing I guess.

jack.ukleja.com/wcf-data-services-vs-wcf-ria-se...

Gravatar

# re: A marketing mistake: WCF Data Services & WCF RIA Services 2/8/2010 3:37 PM Simone Basso

Sound to me like they are exactly the same thing.
Since WCF Data Services might be too hard to configure for some, they created WCF RIA Services that is nothing more than WCF Data Services with some more default settings and behaviours.

jack.ukleja.com/wcf-data-services-vs-wcf-ria-se...
this says
RIA Services is not based on top of Data Services
RIA Services & Data Services will “align”

so may be I'm wrong...

Title  
Name  
Email
Url
Comments   
Please add 7 and 4 and type the answer here: