A lot of business applications that are being developed in Silverlight today are built with the help of WCF RIA Services. This should come as no surprise, as it’s a really powerful, extensible framework which provides us with a lot of features out of the box (validation, authentication, authorization, …) that otherwise would require quite a lot of custom code, workarounds & plumbing. In WCF RIA Services, you’re going to be working with a client-side Domain Context instance.

When you’re going to be working with this, there are several approaches you can take: you can work with one shared Domain Context instance, you can work with one instance per ViewModel, you can combine both, …

All strategies come with certain (dis)advantages, so if you’re architecting a new Silverlight solution, it’s important to know what these are (and how you can handle them).

For Silverlight Show, I wrote a two-part article series on this.  The first part has just been published, so if you’re interested in this, go check it out! :-)

Update: as of Saturday 19/03, the second part has been published as well.

Happy coding!