Jack Ukleja

At PDC this year Microsoft announced that Surface development resources were going to be made publicly available. (Up until now it had been an “invitation only” system).

This is great news and means anyone can build or prototype Surface applications. The Surface SDK comes with a very good simulator. A table is still needed to evaluate performance and usability, but you can go a long way with just the simulator.

Here is a copy & paste from a recent mail-out:

Surface Web site (http://www.surface.com)

• A new Technical Resources section to help you connect to the other available resources and support.

MSDN (http://msdn.microsoft.com)

• A new Microsoft Surface section of the MSDN Library (under .NET Development), providing the Surface SDK documentation and other topics about developing Surface applications.
• New Surface-specific forums about designing and developing Surface applications.

TechNet (http://technet.microsoft.com)

• A new Microsoft Surface section of the TechNet Library (under Products and Technologies), describing the basics of the Surface software and hardware and how to set up, customize, troubleshoot, and maintain Surface units.
• New Surface-specific forums about the Surface software platform, hardware, and applications.

Microsoft Download center (http://www.microsoft.com/downloads)

• A new product category for all Surface downloads, including the Surface SDK Workstation Edition, applications, documentation, and any software fixes.

Microsoft Support (http://support.microsoft.com)

• Public Surface KB articles for fixes, known issues, and workarounds.
• Surface Solution Center to direct customers to the right self-support and assisted-support options.

I’ve been having trouble finding a straight forward comparison of these two technologies. On the surface they appear to be solving similar, if not the same problems.

Make no mistake – the message coming from Microsoft is not clear or consistent – which probably explains the confusion. I suspect the relationship between these two products is still being “discovered” by MS.

Anyway, in this bliki I will try to sum up my findings as to the differences between them as I figure them out.

Common features

• Based on WCF
• Use a RESTful architecture
• Can be used to expose any data source (sql, xml, poco/objects etc.)
• Client side libraries provide ability to query using LINQ

General

• Currently they do not share much (any?) technology / code
• RIA Services is not based on top of Data Services
• RIA Services & Data Services will “align”
• OData eventually pushed down into WCF stack

Your opinions are welcome!

References

http://blogs.msdn.com/brada/archive/2009/03/19/what-is-net-ria-services.aspx

http://mschannel9.vo.msecnd.net/o9/mix/09/pptx/t36f.pptx

http://blogs.msdn.com/endpoint/archive/2009/11/18/the-wcf-services-ecosystem.aspx

http://www.douglaspurdy.com/2009/11/20/on-odata-open-data-protocol/

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/data/ee844254.aspx

http://blogs.msdn.com/saurabh/archive/2009/11/23/understanding-the-wcf-in-wcf-ria-services.aspx

Some tutorials from the Expression Blend 3 help docs (e.g. “Try it: Display data from a sample SQL database”, which is based on these two articles) require a class that is present in the ColorSwatch WPF sample. The problem is that someone appears to have forgotten to bundle the ColorSwatch sample with the Blend 3!

To save you the hassle of trying to track down the DelegateCommand class here it is:

using System;
using System.Collections.Generic;
using System.Text;
using System.Windows.Input; 

namespace ColorSwatch
{
    public sealed class DelegateCommand : ICommand
    {
        public delegate void SimpleEventHandler(); 

        private SimpleEventHandler handler; 

        private bool isEnabled = true; 

        public DelegateCommand(SimpleEventHandler handler)
        {
            this.handler = handler;
        } 

        #region ICommand implementation 

        void ICommand.Execute(object arg)
        {
            this.handler();
        } 

        bool ICommand.CanExecute(object arg)
        {
            return this.IsEnabled;
        } 

        public event EventHandler CanExecuteChanged; 

        #endregion 

        public bool IsEnabled
        {
            get { return this.isEnabled; }
            set
            {
                this.isEnabled = value;
                this.OnCanExecuteChanged();
            }
        } 

        private void OnCanExecuteChanged()
        {
            if (this.CanExecuteChanged != null)
            {
                this.CanExecuteChanged(this, EventArgs.Empty);
            }
        }
    }
} 

This is what I was greeted with today when I plugged my Patriot Xplorer XT USB stick into my Windows 7 HTPC: