.NET RIA Services relies heavily on metadata annotations for expressing intent beyond what can be inferrd via convention. For example, validation rules on entities and members can be declared as annotations, which then enable a variety of consumption scenarios. We also have metadata for describing model aspects in DAL-agnostic fashion, and hints for automatic UI-generation. What we have today is just a first step. The general design we're enabling is actually quite flexible. For example, a number of developers want to have metadata specified external to their code, for example in XML files or in a database. Some don't like attributes, and have asked for a fluent interface instead. In RIA Services, we wanted to create a consistent API...(read more) ...
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