>WCF RIA has not been released to manufacturing yet, so I can't use it in any production environment or even serious development. RIA is slated for release sometime next year, and between today and then a lot can happen to the API that can break my code. Be that as it may, it still seems that .NET is playing catch-up with stuff MS has had for years, even decades already.
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>Hopefully RIA will address many if not all of the current pain points when it finally arrives. With new features coming in VS 2010 and Silverlight 4, it could well be that programmer productivity will increase significantly in the future. In the meanwhile, hope springs but the pain remains.


There's another solution that abstracts much of the pain. Look at ADO .Net Data Services (Astoria). I have used this prior to RIA services.