Deploying and Configuring Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services

I really enjoy building applications using Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services. Working locally works great and usually there are few issues. Deployment to our servers, however, is a different story.  I have learned more than I care to know about IIS, handlers, and other server stuff while trying to get my Silverlight w/RIA applications running on our servers.  Here are some tips and lessons learned from my deployment.

Setup your server for Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services:

• Download and install the Web Platform Installer.
• Use the installer to install the .NET 4 Framework.  Reboot the server after this completes.
• Download and install WCF RIA Services.
  • I used the “download WCF RIA Services RC 2 directly” link and saved the RiaServices.msi file on my local machine (e.g. c:\temp).
  • Open up a command window (I used “Run as Administrator”).  Go to the folder with the MSI file (e.g. c:\temp) and type the following command to launch the install of WCF RIA Services:  msiexec /i RiaServices.msi SERVER=TRUE

That should be enough to get your server configured to handle Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services.  My first attempt at deployment worked like a charm.  I was working with IIS6 and everything went smoothly.  My next attempt did not go so well.  The server runs IIS7 and I was having some major difficulties.

Here are some links to tips on deployment and troubleshooting that I found to be most helpful for my problem.

• Tim Heuer – Deploying your Silverlight and WCF RIA Services application.  This post was a life saver.  Make a note about turning on WCF Activation for .NET Framework 3.0.  Here is a link that helped me resolve that issue.
• WCF RIA Services Breaking changes documentation.
• Configuring WCF on IIS7.  This link provided me the details I needed to resolve my issue.

My Error:

Could not load type ‘System.ServiceModel.Activation.HttpHandler’ from assembly ‘System.ServiceModel, Version=3.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=b77a5c561934e089′.

Resolution:

Using the Configuring WCF on IIS7 document, I opened up the applicationHost.config file and removed all entries that pointed to the ServiceModel version 3.0.0.0.  After doing this my application started working.

Now that our server is running Silverlight 4 and WCF RIA Services, there is no stopping us now.  Keep coding my friends.