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

This is part 4 of this series which I don’t know when it will ends :o). In part 3 I started to to explore the Core of KiGG. In this part we are still inside the core, but we are going further deep to have a look inside the infrastructure.

I’m going to talk about infrastructure for the next couple of posts or maybe more. Because actually it contains the heart of KiGG.

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Just done with my first video about Unit Testing Entity Framework with TypeMock Isolator. It is my very first video actually made in the community.

Also last October, I was interviewed by DotNetArabi on Entity Framework. That was my first Podcast too. The Podcast was in Arabic.

Here are links for both:

• Episode #6 about Entity Framework on DotNetArabi.com (Arabic podcast) available in both ZIP and MP3 formats.
• Unit Testing Entity Framework Video on TypeMock

Hope you’ll enjoy it.

Introduction

Again I was honored to present a talk on first Egyptian .Net user group “DotNetWork”. My previous session -the first- was a joint session with Bishoy Ghaly about Entity Framework v1 in .Net 3.5 SP1. This session was about Entity Framework 4.0.

After we introduced Entity Framework to Egyptian community, I decided to give them a sneak peak at the new version of it. Comparing between both versions, showing the evolution and the massive enhancement made on the new version. The session covered the early CTP 1 of Entity Framework 4.0 Beta 1 that is released last June.

Presentation is available to download here.

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Introduction

One of the challenging things with current version of Entity Framework, its leakage of testability. Which means when you build an application or module (e.g. Repositories) that depends on entity framework, it will be very hard to unit test your code isolated from Entity Framework. This might lead to conduct Integration Testing which will require a connection and interaction with underlying data store (database).

You might think of using Mocking to mock or fake Entity Framework data store dependent calls. But sadly Moq and Rhino Mock mocking frameworks do not support this. And you’ll end up hitting the wall. Both frameworks are great useful and I personally use Moq for a while now and very happy with it. But no one can deny limitations when exist.

And personally I was able to overcome the limitation of the testability of Entity Framework while I was working in KiGG Entity Framework based models and repositories. But done that through unnecessary code refactoring and wrappers around none mockable classes such as sealed class EntityCollection<T>.

Finding a solution with TypeMock Isolator

In fact there is a solution, that will save you lots of workarounds and unnecessary code refactoring. You just need a full isolation framework. TypeMock Isolator provides this capability. It allows to mock sealed classes and classes that have private constructors, static methods, and much more.

TypeMock isolator makes it easy to simulate and break the dependencies of any object in your existing code. In that way, it doesn’t force you to think about how your design might need to change. –The Art of Unit Testing book page 132-

So, TypeMock isolator is a perfect mate for testing code that has dependencies on Entity Framework as how I am going to show now.

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Introduction

One of the features introduced in Entity Framework is being database independent. Which mean each database provider can support Entity Framework by implementing its provider.

This feature allows you build applications independent from the underplaying database provider. In this post I’m going to show how to build an application that support multiple databases using same conceptual model made by Entity Framework.

Entity Framework providers

Entity Framework is database independent. Each database provider could have its own Entity Framework provider. Currently there are several database provider who support the current version of Entity Framework that is released with .Net 3.5 SP1.

A list of Entity Framework providers can be found here.

Entity Framework multiple database support sample

In this post, I am going to demonstrate a sample application (based on northwind database) that is going to support both SQL Server database engine and MySQL database engine.

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Bishoy Ghaly & me made an introductory presentation about Entity Framework for the first time in DotNetWork User Group in Cairo, Egypt –Saturday 18th July-

After a survey we made in June we discovered that an introductory session to Entity Framework is a must. So we prepared this 3 hours session -level 100- to introduce Entity Framework to the audiences.

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Introduction

KiGG is a Web 2.0 style social news web application developed in Microsoft supported technologies. It is an open source project hosted on CodePlex. It is live and running as DotNetShoutout.com.

KiGG and Entity Framework

On May 2009, I’ve completed the implementation of Entity Framework support on KiGG. KiGG design was very flexible to plug another repository implementation other than LINQ to SQL. So basically now KiGG comes with 2 repository flavours, LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework.

Read about how to configure your KiGG application to use Entity Framework.

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Microsoft ADO.Net team released (this month June 2009) a set of features that build on top of Entity Framework 4.0 Beta 1
The features included in this CTP are :

1. Templates for Self-Tracking Entities (N-Tier support)
2. Templates for POCO (Plain Old CLR Objects) Entities
3. Code-Only Programming Model that allows you to write Entity Data Model based applications without requiring external artifacts

CTP can be downloaded here

Enjoy it.

Introduction

While working with Entity Framework v1 during KiGG implementation of Entity Framework repositories, I decided to test KiGG for partial trust environment. Particularly Medium Trust support. Will not go through whether KiGG currently support medium trust or not in it current or upcoming version, but I will go through one of the reasons why KiGG currently might not support medium trust. It is because MY implementation of Entity Framework. Note that I am saying MY, because Entity Framework application can run on medium trust.

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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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I had few previous posts about DDD & TDD with Entity Framework that you might need to return to them before you proceed with this post. To summarize these posts, I was trying to build testable Models that is based on EF. But EF doesn't support Persistence Ignorance in its first version which make testing it in most cases require a database connection where you can test you code against it. My target was to build a testable models based on EF and that is independent of any underlying data source.

Introduction, Domain Model Review:

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I decided to provide some integration testing before proceeding as a proof of concept. In integration testing I will connect to the database and perform unit testing while connecting to the database.\

This unit test is almost identical to the one in my previous post. Except here I am testing the results that is coming out from EF and Database.

My target is to test IDataContext Implemented methods in NorthwindDataContext. Find below the Integration unit testing class. More...