Kodyaz Development Resources

The ADO.NET Entity Data Model Designer Extension Starter Kit has been updated to work with Visual Studio 2010 RC bits. Get the latest version here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/DesignerExtStartKit. - Julia Kornich, Content Publisher, Entity Framework  

Today we are releasing Entity Framework Feature CTP 3. This updated preview addresses compatibility with Visual Studio 2010 RC for Code First (the new name for Code Only) so that users can continue to work with our code-based metadata generation feature alongside the RC. Other changes include: Self Tracking Entities templates are no longer in this CTP as they are included with Visual Studio 2010 RC Code First now exposes cascading delete functionality implicitly through some convention... [read more]

A refresh of the POCO Template that is compatible with Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate is now available in the Extension Manager of Visual Studio and through Visual Studio Gallery. For an introduction on how to use the template, please see the POCO Template Walkthrough (no updates have been made to the walkthrough for this version). The RC compatible version of the POCO Template contains all the improvements made in the Beta 2 compatible version, including generated code improvements, r... [read more]

Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 RC was announced earlier this week on Soma’s blog. Included in this release are a set of improvements in Entity Framework runtime and designer. Here are some of the highlights: Entity Framework Better N-Tier support: Visual Studio 2010 now includes code generation templates for  Self-Tracking Entities. You no longer have to download the Entity Framework Feature CTP to get this functionality. Self-Tracking Entities are POCO classes that can track the... [read more]

As we get closer to the launch of VS2010, we’re beginning to shift a bit of our focus to planning for the next round, and we’re looking for your help! To help us prioritize our future work, we’d like to hear your feedback – is there a feature that you’ve always wanted to have?  To make it easier to submit feedback we’ve created a Connect site that will allow you provide feedback directly to our teams (Entity Framework, WCF Data Services, etc) we’ve created a Connect site.  The site wil... [read more]

The "Entity Designer Database Generation Power Pack" is a downloadable addition to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 which includes some new database generation technologies. The original Database Generation feature in the Entity Designer in VS 2010 is extensible via Windows Workflows and T4 Templates. This Power Pack builds on these extensibility mechanisms and introduces the following: Basic Table-per-Hierarchy support. This is represented by the “Generate T-SQL via T4 (TPH)” workflow. The SSDL and ... [read more]

Do you want to help define the future of the Entity Framework? We are actively looking for Software Developer Engineers in Test (SDE/T). With the successful release of Visual Studio 2010 and the team moving to the next release, we could use your help in driving the vision for the next version of the product that is rapidly becoming the best ORM on the market. Use your technical and design skills to ensure that future versions of the Entity Framework meet our customers’ high expectations. You are... [read more]

Note: The download links in Visual Studio Gallery have been disabled while we prepare to release a refresh of the template that is compatible with Visual Studio 2010 Release Candidate. In the meanwhile, you can use the VSIX installers attached to this post, which are compatible with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 only. Today we are releasing an updated version of the POCO entity generation templates that work with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. You can download them immediately using the Extension Manag... [read more]

Yesterday, a reader posted a question asking me to comment on SQL Server's algorithm for choosing implicit conversions.  When SQL Server encounters an expression with mismatched types, it has two options.  It can execute the query with an implicit conversion or it can fail with an error.  Before digging into the implicit conversion scenario, let's briefly consider the error case. If an implicit conversion is not possible, there are two possible errors that SQL Server can generate.... [read more]

Introduction The Portable Extensible Metadata is a subset of the schema metadata enabled scenarios (the most common ones) built on the Entity Framework Designer extensibility model that enable rich development experience in tools and auto-generation of code. Much in the same way that MIME is a mechanism for extending and annotating media with metadata, schema metadata is about extending and annotating storage elements from different systems with metadata. Amongst other features this will better... [read more]

I came across a few great resources on Entity Framework recently. Check out the tutorial and the projects here: http://weblogs.asp.net/zeeshanhirani/archive/2008/12/18/my-christmas-present-to-the-entity-framework-community.aspx. This contains a very informative learning guide that includes many mapping examples,  LINQ to Entities query examples, databases that are used in the examples, and much more. The tutorial is based on the Entity Framework version 1 (introduced in .NET Framework 3.... [read more]

This is the second of a two part blog series on using POCO proxies in the Entity Framework 4.0. The first post described the capabilities of proxies and details on how they work. Using proxies means your types aren’t exactly as your system expects. This can pose challenges for operations such as serialization where having the right type is critical. This post demonstrates the best practices for using proxies in scenarios where serialization is involved, either through WCF DataContract serializat... [read more]

The Entity Framework (EF) in .NET 4.0 introduces the ability to interact with entities with persistence ignorance (POCOs). While this favors separation of concerns, it also means that the entities will do less because they cannot talk directly to the data access layer. Another new concept in EF 4.0 is the idea of dynamically generated proxies for such entities. Opting into proxies is an easy way to get additional capabilities like lazy loading and change tracking, while still keeping the entity ... [read more]

This walkthrough will demonstrate how to use the new Plain Old CLR Object (POCO) support in Entity Framework 4.0 to develop an application using Test-Driven Development (TDD). In the first release of EF, entity classes had to inherit from EntityObject or implement one of the EF interfaces, which meant your classes had to have direct dependencies on the EF. As a result, writing unit tests that verified the logic for just your domain objects was challenging. The tests would have to interact with t... [read more]

The goal of this walkthrough is to demonstrate a basic scenario for the use of the Self-Tracking Entities feature of Entity Framework.  Self-Tracking Entities consist on a set of code generation templates based on Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) technology that is used to generate entity types that have the ability to record changes on scalar and complex property values, and on reference and collection navigation properties, independently of the Entity Framework. The main scenario... [read more]

A new feature of the Entity Framework in .NET 4.0 is the ability to return collections of complex type instances from stored procedures. In the next public release of the designer, we have enriched this functionality by adding the ability to automatically create these complex types by querying stored procedure metadata from the database server. To demonstrate this feature, we will use the Northwind database, and we will focus on a stored procedure called “CustOrdersDetail”. Looking at the design... [read more]

This post covers Code Only improvements in the CTP2 release for VS 2010 Beta2. This walkthrough shows how you can change the default model like specifying property facets and navigation property inverses as well change the default mapping by changing the default inheritance strategy and table and column names. You can learn more about the CTP2 Code-Only improvements from our blog post on the EFDesign blog. Code Only ships as part of the Microsoft Entity Framework Feature CTP 2. The CTP work... [read more]

The ADO.NET Providers team still needs your input.  This is the last week to answer our ADO.NET Managed Providers Planning survey.   Help us to make the decisions that will benefit our database community.   The survey can be found at http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/11/01/the-ado-net-providers-team-wants-to-hear-your-opinion.aspx.   ThanksLuiz Fernando SantosProgram Manager, SQLClient

Last March Alex James posted to our design blog about our plans for adding foreign keys to the entity framework. Since then we’ve pushed forward with implementing FK associations and properties and have included them in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. This article offers a walkthrough of foreign key relationships in the EF and how they’re useful in VS2010 Beta2. For more information, the documentation and a number of blogs offer useful background about the logic behind adding EF foreign key relations... [read more]

We’ve released an update of the Entity Framework Feature CTP!  The updated CTP includes many requested improvements and added features we’ve gathered from the community since the release of our first CTP and supports installation with Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 as well.  Some of the improvements and added features added since the last CTP include: Enhancements to Code Only, including- Fine Grained Control over model Specify Navigation Property Inverses Specify Property Facets Complex... [read more]

In a previous post, we walked through the designer’s “out of the box” database schema generation experience. In this post, we show how some new designer features in VS2010 Beta 2 integrate with this capability, then we pop the hood and show how easy it is to replace or extend parts of the generation system. We will begin with a simple model that contains two newly supported constructs: Employee.EmployerId is a foreign key that references Company.Id, and Person.Address is a complex type. To sho... [read more]

This is the time when we, the ADO.NET Providers team, take a step back, review our goals for the next release and identify areas for investments. We view YOU as a key stakeholder in this process and would like to gather your inputs in this survey, which should take no more than 10 - 15 minutes. The answers you provide will give us the background for some of the key decisions that will benefit our database community - developers, DBAs and everybody who use SQL Server or are looking for ways to ... [read more]

Just a quick note to let everyone know we’re actively working on an updated Feature CTP for Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2.  As soon as the bits are ready we’ll release and post here again.  Currently the plan is to include some great new enhancements for Code Only and Self-Tracking Entities with the bits. Please be patient & stay tuned! Thanks! The Entity Framework Team

Providers for Entity Framework 3.5 will work unmodified against Entity Framework 4.0. Also, most of the features and improvements introduced in Entity Framework 4.0 will just work against an Entity Framework 3.5 provider. However, there are several features that require provider changes to be enabled. Below is a list of these features along with short description of the changes required to enable them. New features in Entity Framework Runtime impacting providers New EDM (Canonical) Functions ... [read more]

Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4 Beta 2 are now available for download by MSDN subscribers and will available to the rest of the world on Wednesday. Beta 2 as well the VS2010 Launch date of March 22, 2010 were announced this morning on Soma’s blog. Included in Beta 2 are some great new features and updates for the Entity Framework 4 and ADO.NET Data Services 4. Entity Framework 4 Beta 2 In addition to all of the new EF 4 features that were included in Beta 1, Beta 2 also includes: F... [read more]