Kodyaz Development Resources

The Entity Framework offers very rich inheritance mapping schemes for building your conceptual model. The inheritance capabilities in EF include: ·         TPH (Table per Hierarchy): This is the inheritance scheme where there is a single table in the database representing the hierarchy, but the conceptual model includes multiple entities. ·         TPT (Table per Type): In this scheme, each type in the ... [read more]

To someone who has used emacs or a basic text editor for programming, jumping into Visual Studio 2010 can seem like going from a Cessna to a fighter jet.  That’s the experience I had last week starting out at Microsoft, and my goal with this post is to provide others taking the plunge into the Entity Framework – or considering taking the plunge – with a handy guide for what it takes to get up and running.  I hope that my fresh perspective will help you in a way that a... [read more]

We’ve release an updated Entity Framework Feature Community Technology Preview (CTP) which is available for download. This is our fourth CTP and includes updates to the Code First feature along with the first preview of our Productivity Improvements for EF.Feature CTP4 contains a preview of new features that we are considering adding to the core framework in the future and would like to get community feedback on. Feature CTP4 builds on top of the existing Entity Framework 4 (EF4) functiona... [read more]

Introduction We recently announced the release of Entity Framework Feature  Community Technology Preview 4 (CTP4) . Feature CTP4 contains a preview of new features that we are considering adding to the core framework in the future and would like to get community feedback on. Feature CTP4 builds on top of the existing Entity Framework 4 (EF4) functionality that shipped with .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010.If you need assistance with CTP4 we have an Entity Framework P... [read more]

Introduction We recently announced the release of Entity Framework Feature  Community Technology Preview 4 (CTP4) . Feature CTP4 contains a preview of new features that we are considering adding to the core framework in the future and would like to get community feedback on. Feature CTP4 builds on top of the existing Entity Framework 4 (EF4) functionality that shipped with .NET Framework 4.0 and Visual Studio 2010. This post will provide a walkthrough of the fundamental compo... [read more]

One of the most important uses of CTEs is to write recursive queries.  In fact, CTEs provide the only means to write recursive queries.  As I noted last week, there are several excellent CTE examples, including recursive CTE examples, in Books Online.  I'll once again start with the examples from Books Online.  To run these examples, you'll need to install the Adventure Works Cycles OLTP sample database. Recursive CTEs always follow the same pattern.  The body of the CT... [read more]

In this post, I will finish the discussion of recursive CTEs that I began in my last post.  I will continue to use the CTE examples from Books Online.  To run these examples, you'll need to install the Adventure Works Cycles OLTP sample database. In my last post, I explained that all recursive queries follow the same pattern of one or more anchor sub-selects and one or more recursive sub-selects combined by a UNION ALL.  Similarly, all recursive query plans also follow the same p... [read more]

Background EF4 supports the use of server-generated GUIDs, which has been a popular request since EF 3.5. Lee Dumond summarized his experience on how to use this feature very well. But you may find that the performance of server-generated GUIDs is not as fast as client-side generated GUIDs or even the server side Identity columns of other types like int, smallint etc. I would like to take a few moments to explain why that is and how we are going to improve it. Performance Analysis Fir... [read more]

If you missed out on all the festivities at TechEd North America in New Orleans last week, be sure to check out www.msteched.com and catch the talks online.  All week long there was a ton of excitement about the new features in Entity Framework 4.0 and WCF Data Services/OData and lots of great questions.  Here’s a list of sessions that covered OData and Entity Framework:   Entity FrameworkOverview of the Microsoft ADO.NET Entity Framework  Julie Lerman, Chris Sells&nbs... [read more]

MARS (Multiple Active Result Sets) is a feature in SQL Server / ADO.NET that allows for multiple results-sets to be streamed over a single connection; this enables for simpler programmability in many scenarios. Entity Framework leverages MARS for supporting features such as lazy loading (for example, consider the case where you are iterating over a set of customers, and loading the set of orders for each customer that is returned). MARS is turned ON by default when you use the Entity Framework d... [read more]

We recently posted a whitepaper (written by Scott Allen) on MSDN that demonstrates ways to write testable code with EF4.  You can read the article here, and if you have feedback please post it in the comments below.

Self-tracking entities have several utility methods to do things like AcceptChanges and StartTracking which work over a single entity. However, there are cases where it would be nice to be able to do similar operations but on a set of entities instead of just one.  In this post, I’ll describe two options for performing operations on sets of entities, one that works with entities that are attached to an ObjectContext, and one more general graph iterator solution based on a T4 template.... [read more]

The Microsoft SQL Server team is working on a portal page that brings together common resources and community links for all data access providers to Microsoft SQL Server.  We’d like your feedback on how useful you will find it and what else you’d like to see included.  Although, at this time we’re concentrating on bringing together the most useful links, in the future we might include more content and your feedback will help us to determine which additional content an... [read more]

A common question the Entity Framework team hears is how to store a set of self-tracking entities in ViewState for an ASP.NET application. There are a number of options for where to store state information in an ASP.NET and I’d recommend this article on MSDN if you are looking for guidance on this. In this post, I’ll use “ViewState” as a representative of the options that are available.   The default T4 code generation template for self-tracking entities does not ha... [read more]

We are excited to share the latest revision of the Entity Framework sample provider for SQL Server. You can find in on Code Gallery here. All existing providers built for Entity Framework 3.5 will work with Entity Framework 4.0 unchanged, however some incremental changes are required if you want your provider to support some of the new capability that is available in Entity Framework 4.0. Changes affecting providers were detailed in an earlier blog post, and can be found here. This update to the... [read more]

Developers using the .NET Framework Data Provider for ODBC, the .NET Framework Data Provider for OLE DB, or the NET Framework Data Provider for SQL Server often send feedback to Microsoft, asking for a complete list of the exceptions that a given method can throw.   Until such time as the documentation team updates the reference topics for all members in all types of the (above) mentioned providers, this post can provide some guidance on what exceptions your application may need to catch. &... [read more]

Had a fascinating conversation with one of our partners today, the meeting was about how they should be integrating all the new test artifacts in VSTS 2010 (Test Cases, Test Plans, Test Configs, Shared Steps, Test Points, Test Results) into their customised process guidance. They already have some Test artifacts in their current guidance and we were discussing how to morph that into the new world. The conversation quickly turned to what we call the “No More No Repro Scenario”. This is where we ... [read more]

In Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4.0, the Entity Framework team added a T4 template for generating self-tracking entities to provide an easier experience building N-tier applications that need to send entities with changes between tiers. Since we first introduced self-tracking entities as a CTP, one common question is whether these entities are compatible with other platforms such as Silverlight, and if so what are the best practices for structuring your solution. In this blog post, I will build a... [read more]

A while ago, we, the core ADO.NET team, sent out a survey in order to gather your feedback about some suggestions and future ideas for our products. Now, it’s more than time to share the results with you. We had a total of 559 respondents, most from Europe and USA, representing mostly software manufacturers, financial services, healthcare and consulting companies. In terms of performance, most of the respondents feel good about SqlClient. Now, Managed ODBC and Managed OLEDB are considered ... [read more]

In a previous post (http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2009/08/05/improvements-to-the-generated-sql-in-net-4-0-beta1.aspx), we talked about the improvements to the quality and the readability of the SQL generated when querying using the Entity Framework that we made in .NET 4.0 Beta 1.  We continued working on that task and here I talk about the additional improvements provided with .Net 4.0.   Again, most of the improvements we have made are in the Entity Framework query pipeline a... [read more]

Nihit Kaul, a Test Lead on the Entity Framework Designer team posted a great blog entry about type sensing for function imports.  You can check out the full article (with tons of screenshots) here.  Also check out Shyam and Chris' EF4 PDC presentation for video of this feature in action (its around the 34 minute mark).

A while ago, someone came to me with a very interesting problem: basically, his .NET application was taking more than a minute to open a connection. After a quick look and some investigations, we found out that only Named Pipes was enabled on this individual’s SQL Server. Since this is a legitimate configuration, I decided to document this behavior in this post, so that, you can quickly find an answer if you face this problem. As you know, SqlClient implements native access to SQL Server on top... [read more]

In EF4 we shipped a ton of new features.  One of the primary focuses for the team in the release was making the EF4 API surface more approachable and expanding the number of patterns developers could use when writing their data access code.  Many of the features and patterns added stemmed from our work on LINQ to SQL.  LINQ to SQL offers quite a lot of great stuff and we wanted to combine the best of what EF offers with the great patterns offered by LINQ to SQL.  The team tho... [read more]

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]