Group items tagged

"This is a question that I get very frequently, and I always tried to dodged the bullet, but I get it so much that I feel that I have to provide an answer. Obviously, I am (not so) slightly biased toward NHibernate, so while you read it, please keep it in mind. EF 4.0 has done a lot to handle the issues that were raised with the previous version of EF. Thinks like transparent lazy loading, POCO classes, code only, etc. EF 4.0 is a much nicer than EF 1.0. The problem is that it is still a very young product, and the changes that were added only touched the surface. I already talked about some of my problems with the POCO model in EF, so I won't repeat that, or my reservations with the Code Only model. But basically, the major problem that I have with those two is that there seems to be a wall between what experience of the community and what Microsoft is doing. Both of those features shows much of the same issues that we have run into with NHibernate and Fluent NHibernate. Issues that were addressed and resolved, but show up in the EF implementations."

"The CTP includes some work called the Productivity Improvements for EF which aims to provide a simpler and more productive experience writing data access code with EF. Along with a bunch of conventions that take care of a lot of common tasks the Productivity Improvements also include some more subtle improvements over the core EF API. One of these is the introduction of an Include method that uses a lambda rather than strings to specify the include path."

"Class-Level Model Validation with EF Code First and ASP.NET MVC 3 10 December 2010 11:05 AM"

"Assuming a WorkItem has many WorkItemNotes..."

"This article describes an All-In-One Code Framework sample that is available for download. This code sample demonstrates how to use complex type, which is one of the new features of Entity Framework 4.0 (EF4). This code sample shows how to add complex type properties to entities, how to map complex type properties to table columns, and how to map a Function Import to a complex type."

"When I finished reading this post I let out a heavy sigh. It is not going to work. Basically, the EF is going the same way that NHibernate was in NHibernate 1.0 (circa 2005!)."

"Like many developers, I happen to be a fan of using uniqueidentifier columns as primary keys on database tables (as opposed to the other common practice of using integers). While I don't do this all the time, in many cases I think it just makes sense, especially when the records in and of themselves don't share a "sequential" relationship to one another. I understand this is a rather controversial topic in some circles; with good arguments on both sides. Quite frankly, whether you personally agree with this practice or not is beside the point. For the purposes of this discussion, it's just important that you understand two things: one, that this done all the time; and two, that this scenario was not properly supported under Entity Framework V1."

All about using POCOs only

"This topic describes patterns that you can use to load related entities. Entity types can define navigation properties that represent associations in the data model. You can use these properties to load entities that are related to the returned entity by the defined association. When entities are generated based on the data model, navigation properties are generated for entities at both ends of an association. These navigation properties return either a reference on the "one" end of a one-to-one or many-to-one relationship or a collection on the "many" end of a one-to-many or many-to-many relationship. For more information, see Navigation Properties and Defining and Managing Relationships. "

"Hopefully if you're reading this you've noticed that I've started a series of Tips recently. The tips will mostly apply to Entity Framework or Data Services. Seeing as I expect to have a lots of tips, it probably makes sense to have some sort of index. That is what this is post is, as I add a new tip I will add it to this page too. If you have any suggested topics for tips please let me know by leaving a comment or emailing me directly at Microsoft (Alexj is my alias at Microsoft, and emails at Microsoft are in the form alias@microsoft.com) Without further ado here are what I have so far:"

"In an earlier blog post, Creating or modifying Entity Framework EDMX files from code: an introduction to HuagatiEDMXTools.dll, I wrote about the EDMX file wrapper that is used by the Huagati DBML/EDMX Tools add-in for parsing, updating, creating, and writing EDMX files. HuagatiEDMXTools adds an easy to use object model on top of EDMX files (see documentation at http://huagati.com/edmxtools/help ), making it a lot easier to create/read/update EDMX files, and to write LINQ queries against Entity Framework 4 metadata. It also has a number of built-in queries and lookup functions that make it a breeze to work with Entity Framework 4 EDMX files from code."

" April 2011 saw the release of a new version of Entity Framework 4.1; this blog article and samples of code contained in it have been correspondingly updated to match the new features that are now available."

" Scott Allen explains how to create unit tests for applications making use of the ADO.NET Entity Framework 4.1. "