It seems like Microsoft has teams cranking out frameworks left right and center.. the Common Application Blocks, the MVC Framework, and today I came across Microsoft's new .NET RIA Service Framework.

What does it do? A lot! It provides a complete framework for an n-tier Silverlight application that fetches data from some back end store, binds it to the UI, manipulates it and writes it back.

It is a crafty combination of metadata, naming conventions, code generation and classes that helps you wire up the plumbing and handle tasks like change detection, validation, authorization in a very straight forward manner.

I recommend that you check out the technology if you are about to embark on a n-tier Silverlight application and don't want to write all the plumbing yourself!