The MIX build of RIA services has a bug that has been fixed since. But you might experience it as I did this morning and go around in circles for a while. This blog post is to help you avoid wasting that time.

I normally create my model is in its own project and hadn’t seen this problem until this morning.

If you add a model into a RIA Services project (e.g., the web project created from the Silverlight Business Application template), you must build the project before you create a new Domain Service Class with the wizard.

If the project wasn’t built in advance, then you will see the model, but not the entities:

What I did then was Cancel and build the project. But it was too late. The entities would not show up after this when I tried to create a new Domain Service class. The only way to get them to show at this point is to close and reopen Visual Studio.

It’s a bug and has been fixed post-Mix, but until then, remember to build after you add in the model file.

Hopefully you won’t spend as much time as I did trying to understand the problem. Thanks to Jeff Handley and Ron Cain from the RIA Services team who finally identified the problem and confirmed that it’s been eradicated.