Commodities: Graphite bound to WCF RIA Services

A new Graphite sample (just click on the picture to see it live) has been added which demonstrates:

• Databinding of data coming a WCF RIA Service
• Expand/collapse of nodes from a given node with data from the RIA Service
• Labels on connections with data coming from the WCF RIA Services
• Customization of the nodes and databinding to the fetched WCF data
• Zooming and inflation (relaxation) of the diagram through databinding
• Custom controls inside the node to expand/collapse adjacent nodes
• General UI and Silverlight techniques (diverse utility classes are provided to help access resources, walk the visual tree and more)
• A custom container control to expand/collapse some info and a search panel
• Drag-drop from a control onto the surface (uses the DragdropManager of Telerik)

This was a hugely fun project to work on, the only minor detail was the deployment and I guess a lot depends on your provider and how easy it is for you to manage the settings of IIS. A few things I learned from this is:

• set the ‘copy to local’ to true to pretty much every assembly in your solution, don’t expect the assemblies to be present on the host
• set the security to anonymous on IIS and remove the “<authentication mode=”Forms”>” section from your web.config. Typically you’ll get a “The remote server returned an error: NotFound” message which doesn’t reflect the real issue. Also, trying to discover the underlying issues through Fiddler or Firebug will not reveal much.

Note: the data (company names, prices…) in the sample is random and is not connected to any real-world commodity-service. This sample demonstrates features of Graphite and is not meant to give any information on any real-world commodity.