What Is The Difference Between RIA and WCF Services ? | WCF Interview Question

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  • WCF is concerned with technical aspects of communication between servers across tiers and message data management whereas RIA Web Services delegates this 
  • functionality to WCF. 
  • WCF is a generic service that could be used in Windows Forms for example whereas RIA Web Services is focused on Silverlight and ASP.NET clients 
  • WCF does not generate source code to address class business logic such as validation that may need to be shared across tiers like RIA Web Services does. 
  • The RIA Services can either exist on top of WCF or replace the WCF layer with RIA Services using alternatice data source e.g. an ORM layer(EF/NHibernate etc.) 
  • RIA Services allow serializing LINQ queries between the client and server.