As regular readers of my blog know (RIA Services Concerns Squashed), I have been a lukewarm supporter of RIA Services for Silverlight. As many of you know, Brad Abrams and company have come through with their latest release (RIA Services Preview July '09) with lots of changes I’ve been hoping for. Honestly I haven’t had time to look at the new build (probably this weekend), but I am hopeful of its overall direction. I am still somewhat tentitive about some of the basic behavior of the framework but I will hold my tongue until I have more time to dive deeper into the code.

What really concerns me is that I’ve talked to students and others and many are opting to building systems with RIA Services right now.  This only concerns me because RIA Services is not part of Silverlight 3 and is not released.  Actually, the July version is a “Preview” (something like a CTP) which means they haven’t even reached Beta with RIA Services.  Now many these developers are working on very long time lines and can wait until RIA Services releases, but while investigating it makes a lot of sense (and I encourage everyone do that), building production code against a framework that is still in transition is a risky venture in my opinion.

I am curious who out there is using RIA Services in production systems that will ship this year.  Could you comment on the blog with whether you’re using it for an upcoming project?