17.1 WCF RIA Services architecture, tooling, and template

WCF RIA Services applications are similar to traditional Silverlight applications in that there's both a client application and a home server. The server serves up the Silverlight application and also contains the services the application is to use. RIA Services works with multiple-server and multiple-client scenarios; but as mentioned in the introduction, the typical scenario is one server per application domain. Figure 17.1 captures this typical architecture at a high level.

At first glance, the architecture looks like any other Silverlight application, except for that odd shared bit. That's one of the many things that make RIA Services worth the effort to learn.