RIA Services has not yet been released.

The community preview appeared in July 2009. The beta release arrives at PDC 2009 in November. According to an official post on the RIA Service Forum, version 1.0 of RIA Services won’t ship until some unspecified date next year.

Microsoft stated clearly on many occasions that you should not build production applications on RIA Services today. It is strictly experimental. You should be prepared to throw away any RIA Services code that you do write.

Moreover, RIA Services will not work on today’s .NET 3.5. When it is finally released it will depend upon features available only in Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0.

We and many others believe Microsoft is making the right call for RIA Services. Now it’s your turn to make the right call for your business.

If you intend to deliver a critical Silverlight business application in 2009 or 2010, you should look elsewhere for your data services infrastructure. DevForce may be your best bet.

IdeaBlade released its first distributed application development platform for .NET back in 2002. For seven years we’ve improved the product to keep pace with evolving Microsoft .NET technologies and in response to feedback from real customers with real applications.

Silverlight support was an important - incremental – step we took more than a year ago. Hundreds of our clients are building DevForce Silverlight applications right now.

DevForce for Silverlight runs in Visual Studio 2008 on .NET 3.5, Silverlight 3, and Entity Framework v.1 today. We’ll continue to support that technology set even as we take the next step with Visual Studio 2010, .NET 4, Silverlight 4 and Entity Framework 4.

Oh … 1906 was the year of the Great San Francisco Earthquake … just a few years after I was born. “1906” is the code you need to win the RIA Services Challenge.

IdeaBlade offers live support – email and phone – to subscribing customers. We staff support internally. You always speak to people who know the product. They aren’t reading from a script. They understand that your application – your career – is on the line and our reputation rests upon your success.

Quality customer support is a company-wide responsibility. We escalate the tough questions right up the chain of command. We’re not miracle workers but when you are in a jam, we’ll do our best to get you out of it. We have the glowing testimonials to prove it.

As one customer put it “I like knowing I have a neck to wring.”

We don’t know about Moe’s.

The U.S. Army schedules troop training and deployment with a Silverlight application developed by our friends at ProModel.

The UFC Gyms – yes that UFC – is managing its members with a WPF and Silverlight application that shares a common DevForce business object model.

A major financial institution is building a 20,000 customer, multi-tenant application in Windows Forms and ASP.NET using the same DevForce infrastructure behind these WPF and Silverlight applications.

Learn about these and some of our other IdeaBlade customers who rely on DevForce ... and have done so for years.

DevForce X-ray Vision remains in early development with no announced release date.

The other features are available in DevForce today ... unlike any alternative you can name.

Your first model is never your last model. You will revise and extend your storage model, your client model, and how you access your data many times … especially in the first six months. Speedy, friction free iterations are crucial for rapid improvement and customer satisfaction. Try making a few changes with RIAS Services; then try again with DevForce. You won’t go back.

Most of your Silverlight application value is parked in that Silverlight sandbox on the browser. That’s the source of your inspiration; that’s where you work. You want to compose and test your queries right there on the client. You don’t want to retreat to the server and complicate your deployment without a good reason. That’s why full client-side LINQ support is important to you … and only DevForce promises 100% coverage of Entity Framework LINQ on the client.

Does responsiveness matter to you? You chose Silverlight for the rich internet experience. Why waste the user’s time waiting for data that could be on the client already? DevForce caches entities in a client container. Query for them with exactly the same LINQ expressions you used to retrieve them from the database. DevForce merges remote and local query results seamlessly. Of course you can force evictions and refreshes at will.

We are huge Silverlight fans. But some applications require full trust and access to the resources of the PC which are off-limits to Silverlight. The UFC Gyms manages memberships with two clients: a WPF administrative console inside the clubs and a Silverlight member experience for self-service at home. Both clients rest on one DevForce foundation and share the same business model. The same client-side validation logic governs both UIs. One model, one platform, and one skill-set contribute mightily to reduced cost, complexity, and time to market.