I have an issue very similar to this one.
There is an existing software (Data & business layer) running on a server and I want to add a Silverlight GUI client to it. Communication works through WCF services at the moment, but I would like to use WCF RIA services instead.
My architecture looks like this:
Database - DAL - BL - WCF Services - Silverlight client
All business logic is on the server, the Silverlight client is mostly a data viewer.
Questions:
1) Would it make sense to replace the WCF Service (used for communication between client and server) with a WCF RIA Service?
2) Is it possible to have the WCF Service talk to a WCF RIA Service? Like this:
Database - DAL - BL - WCF Services - WCF RIA Service - Silverlight client
or
Database - DAL - BL - WCF Services - Translator - WCF RIA Service - Silverlight client
or
Database - DAL - BL - WCF RIA Service - Silverlight client
All the examples and tutorials for RIA services seem to use them to directly access a database, but what if I want to access a business layer instead? How would I represent the "data objects" on the business layer? And how would I call functions on the server from the client using a RIA service, e.g. to calculate something?