After getting my extension serial number (available here) for Adobe Flash Builder 4 Beta I had a run through the new wizard functionality available for connecting to Data Services.

It’s available from the ‘Data” menu option and gives you the ability to connect to six different types of data sources:

All you need to know ahead of time is the URL of the service you want to connect to and the wizard does a great job of going out to the service and discovering what it contains. It then gives you the ability to fine tune what pieces of the data source you want and generates all the code for you including the Data Transfer Object – Nice!

There’s no comparable wizard functionality in the available tools for Silverlight (Visual Studio and Blend) to connect to data where you’ll need to decide weather to use the WebClient or HttpWebRequest/HttpWebResponse API and then build your DTO by hand and flesh out the Async call handler and DownloadProgressChanged event handler.

I’m not bitching or saying either is better – they are both great tools for building RIAs, but for developer productivity in this use case, Flash Builder does it better -Cheers!