>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>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.
>>
>>Thanks, John. I'll check it out. Do you find RIA to be much or just a little better than Astoria? What does RIA improve in the development process?
>
>Everything is declarative. You add a domain data service class to your web project and it sets up the communication channels between the silverlight client and the web project.
>You then add a domain data source and this gives you sorting, filtering, paging, editing, etc. out of the box with no code behind.
>
>Astoria black boxes much of the communication stuff between client/web but doesn't give nearly the power that RIA does.

I just watched an impressive .NET RIA Intro video (http://silverlight.net/learn/videos/all/net-ria-services-intro/) that goes over a lot of this stuff. Nice to be able to do things declaratively within XAML. Also, the datagrid and dataform automation is quite nice. Still a fair amount of typing, but much better than the code I attached to my original post. Still, a 2-hour demo for a simple many-to-one data entry setup. Given that this includes login authorization, sortable grid, full edit/save/cancel functionality in and out of SQL server, it is getting closer to some of the older technologies (e.g., VFP)

Pertti