Silverlight 4 + RIA Services - Ready for Business: Starting a New Project with the Business Application Template

To kick off our series, I wanted to focus on our goal of helping you focus on your business, not plumbing code. The first place you will see this in the pre-build components in the Business Application Template. It describes a prescriptive application structure, looks great and is easily customizable.

After you have successfully installed Silverlight 4 for developers (which includes RIA Services) you will have a couple of new projects in the Silverlight section. We are going to focus on the Business Application Template.

Notice this creates a single solution with two projects. BusinessApplication1 is the client part of the application and BusinessApplication2 is the server part. These are related projects that know about each other.

And by default you get the framework for a great looking, professional application

The starter application is fully localizable and customizable. For example, I want to change the name of the application from “Application Name” to My Foodie Explorer. This is easily done in the Assets\Resources directory be editing the ApplicationStrings.resx file.

Check out a deeper walk through, it is a bit older, but it is still valid and Tim recently posted SNEAK PEEK: New Silverlight application themes such as:

enjoy!