About Part 6

6th part is about 12 min in length. Covers Entity SQL, LINQ to Entities and EF4 new feature of using database built in functions & user defined functions UDF. And how to use them with LINQ to Entities.

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About the book

Title: Programming Entity Framework 2^nd Edition
Publisher: O'Reilly Media
URL: http://oreilly.com/catalog/9780596807252
Book website: http://learnentityframework.com/
ISBN: 978-0-596-80726-9
Chapters: 27 + 3 Appendices | ~900 pages
Author: Julia Lerman
Author’s blog: http://thedatafarm.com/blog/
Overall rating: 9.70 out of 10
This is the second edition of the book totally revised for Entity Framework 4.0 on VS2010 1^st edition was released Jan 2009. this 2^nd new edition released August 2010.

Personal Opinion

I can’t do anything but strongly recommend this book. It is almost everything you might need about Entity Framework 4.0. Great walkthroughs and samples in C#. However there are few snippet in VB.Net that shows different syntax of doing things between C# & VB.Net.

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About the book

Title: Microsoft Entity Framework in Action
Publisher: Manning Publications
Url: http://www.manning.com/mostarda/
ISBN: 9781935182184
Chapters: 19 + 2 Appendices | ~500 pages
Authors: Stefano Mostarda, Marco De Sanctis, Daniele Bochicchio
Overall rating: 9.24 out of 10

This book was in Manning Early Access Program (MEAP) while writing this review. I reviewed a draft released on 12^th August 2010. This is a detailed review where I rate each chapter and describe it’s contents. The overall rating mentioned above is the average of all chapters’ ratings.

Personal Opinion

I highly recommend this book. No further knowledge about Entity Framework is required. So you don’t have to know anything about EF1 in order to read and gain benefit of this book. Great effort spent on this book by the authors and the publisher. You’ll get a great value with reasonable amount of money compared to the information provided in this book.

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About Part 5

Fifth part is about 9:45 min in length. Part 5. Covers EDM -Entity Data Model- showing its elements (SSDL, CSDL & MSL). Also this screencast shows how to query your conceptual model using LINQ to Entities.

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Last week I introduced a new screencast on another OData Developer tool. It was about how to use LinqPad to query OData service with C#, LINQ & WCF Data Services Client APIs.

The screencast shows how to use LinqPad to connect to and query OData Services using LINQ and WCF Data Services Client APIs. Showing how LinqPad can be useful as a developer tool to test queries against any OData Service.

I case you missed it, you can watch it on ODataPrimer website. You can also download an HD video (~48Mbs). The package contains 2 videos. One of them is the one hosted and it’s a 10 min video. And the other is ~14 min. I had to trim it to fit into youtube. The 14 min video contains additional stuff in case you are interested.

You can also subscribe to ODataPrimer channel on yourtube for future updates and videos.

Hope you’ll enjoy it.

Introduction

You might hear of KiGG, the open source project that is currently live as http://dotnetshoutout.com. I wanted to expose part of KiGG data as an OData Service for read only. But I figured out that exposing raw KiGG schema might not be useful. So I had to choose between 2 options that were up to my mind:

• Build some views on the physical store -database-. Create a new entity data model for those views and use the new data model context for DataServiceContext.
• Use Entity Framework 4.0 conceptual model function feature with complex types to simulate views. It’s like building views on the conceptual model itself and not the store model.

I picked the 2nd option. The sample downloadable sample is available at the end of this post.

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At the end of last month (27-28 Feb 2010) I got the opportunity to participate in Cairo CodeCamp event by giving a session about “Getting Started with Entity Framework 4.0”.

Here is summary of my session –taken from Cairo CodeCamp web site-:

An introduction to Entity Framework 4.0 that will be shipped as part of .Net 4.0 and VS.Net 2010. Exploring new and enhanced features of Entity Framework 4.0. Walking through building entity data model using VS.Net 2010 and Entity Framework 4.0. Examining new design features in Entity Framework introducing Persistence Ignorance.

I uploaded my session and demos. You can download them now. I hope you’ll enjoy the demos and presentation. Click here to download.

All sessions should be posted soon to Cairo CodeCamp web site. Keep tracked for updates.

I have a plan to record my session as screen cast in English and post it here as well. But can’t promise when this will be as I have many other things I committed to recently.

Keep tuned anyway you might find interesting stuff posted soon.

Introduction:

From the moment I put my hands on Visual Studio.Net 2010 Beta 1 and I’m targeting EF4 –Entity Framework 4- as I was very excited to checkout the new cool feature of it.

Here I am going to highlight my first look at Persistence-Ignorance support in EF4.

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On my previous post “What about DataLoadOptions for Entity Framework ObjectContext?” I was suggesting another way to define eager loading for Entity Framework. In this post I will introduce my DataLoadOptions for Entity Framework ObjectContext.

The beginning:

Actually Eager and Lazy loading on Entity Framework is not that much fun like in Linq to Sql. However this is going to be improved in EF4.

Here I will focus on eager loading and my slight improvement to define eager loading in Entity Framework. When I start to think about, I wanted something simple and pretty close to the way Linq to Sql work. In Linq to Sql it is the DataLoadOptions that helps you define eager loading before start using Linq to Sql DataContext.

So I started to explore the DataLoadOptions code using reflector, to better understand how it works and how it helps Linq to Sql define eager loading.

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I think the proper way to start this post is to ask How do you do eager loading with Entity Framework? And the basic native simple answer is by using ObjectQuery<T>.Include(string) method. No matter what you tried to do, you’ll end up using this way.

So there was ideas about how enhance the eager loading in our Entity Framework base applications. You can read about some of these ideas:

• Entity Framework Include with Func & Entity Framework Include with Func next by Matthieu MEZIL
• Typed Eager Loading Using Entity Framework (& What is Eager Loading vs Deferred Loading) by Meligy
• Fetching strategy posts by Simon Segal:
• Fetching Strategies for the Entity Framework - a waste of time for now?
• Entity Framework Repository, Specifications and Fetching Strategies
• The Entity Framework and a unified Lazy and Eager loading framework
• Entity Framework, Repositories, Specifications and Fetching Strategies Part 9.0
• Lazy Loading and Fetching Strategies again, with feeling!
• Lazy Loading and the Entity Framework. How long I can go on like this?

As I said, no matter what you tried, you’ll end up using ObjectQuery<T>.Include(string).

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