ADO.NET team blog : Sample Provider

New sample provider demonstrates Oracle connectivity

dpblogs — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 20:08:00 GMT

As noted on Jaroslaw Kowalski's blog, we have released a new flavor of the ADO.NET Entity Framework sample provider. You can access the Oracle flavor of the sample provider on the Code Gallery site here.

The new sample wraps System.Data.OracleClient instead of System.Data.SqlClient, demonstrating Oracle connectivity from the Entity Framework. We chose to build this second flavor of the sample provider using OracleClient to help the provider writer community as well as to investigate issues that third party provider writers might encounter. As noted in the readme for the OracleClient sample provider, we've addressed many of those issues within the Entity Framework in more recent builds.

The OracleClient flavor of the sample provider also demonstrates some key concepts we wanted to convey to other provider writers such as non-default type mappings, data type coercion in the reader, and canonical functions. For more information on these topics, see Jarek's blog post.

As with the SqlClient flavor of the sample provider, we've chosen a license agreement that we believe will allow most provider writers to leverage the code in the sample to give them a running head start.

Enjoy!

David Sceppa

ADO.NET Program Manager

Entity Framework Provider Updates

dpblogs — Thu, 05 Jun 2008 22:31:00 GMT

Greetings from TechEd!

We've updated the ADO.NET Entity Framework Sample Provider for .NET 3.5 SP1 Beta and posted it at the MSDN Code Gallery site. You can download the sample provider here: http://code.msdn.microsoft.com/EFSampleProvider

Yesterday we held a chalk talk session with many of our provider writer partners. The theater was so full with attendees that we ran out of seats. Representatives from DataDirect, IBM, Oracle and Sybase were in attendance. Over the course of the chalk talk, we addressed a number of general questions before attendees spoke directly with the representatives from the various provider writers. DataDirect announced that they will release an update to their Oracle ADO.NET provider to support the Entity Framework in Q3 of 2008. Both IBM and Sybase demonstrated their provider's accessing their data stores via the Entity Framework.

Reggie Burnett, the lead developer for the MySQL ADO.NET provider, was unable to attend but asked me pass along the following information:

"In the next few days we will be making available a pre-release of version 5.3 with preliminary support for the entity framework as it is found in Visual Studio 2008 SP1 beta. We are firmly committed to supporting this technology and are actively working on it."

David Sceppa

ADO.NET Program Manager

Sample ADO.NET Entity Framework Provider - Beta 3

dpblogs — Tue, 18 Dec 2007 04:37:00 GMT

We've updated the sample provider to work with Beta 3 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The sample provider is available for download as an attachment to this blog post.

The sample provider has undergone some minor changes in moving from Beta 2 to Beta 3. The biggest such in the sample provider is due to changes in the provider manifest. To help provider writers better understand how provider manifests are used in Beta 3, we've included the provider manifest spec along with the sample provider.

As with previous builds, the sample provider wraps System.Data.SqlClient and demonstrates the functionality a provider needs to add in order to support the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The solution that contains the sample provider also includes a modified version of the Entity Framework Query Samples project. The modified project uses the sample provider rather than System.Data.SqlClient.

You'll also find a new project in the solution - ExtendedProvider. This project leverages the sample provider and the Data Designer Extensibility (DDEX) that's part of Visual Studio 2008 to demonstrate how to make an ADO.NET provider available through the various Visual Studio designers, including the ADO.NET Entity Framework Designer.

If you're writing an ADO.NET provider for the Entity Framework and you're not already in touch with me, please drop me a line at David (dot) Sceppa (at) microsoft (dot) com. Enjoy!

David Sceppa

ADO.NET Program Manager

Microsoft Corporation

Sample ADO.NET Entity Framework Provider - Beta 2

dpblogs — Sat, 22 Sep 2007 03:31:00 GMT

We've updated the sample provider to work with Beta 2 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework. The sample provider is available here.

The sample provider has undergone some minor changes in moving from Beta 1 to Beta 2.

The DbProviderServices class has been enhanced to support returning the mapping file that the EdmGen.exe command-line tool uses to retrieve schema information from the database. This new approach leverages the Entity Framework's mapping functionality and the provider's SQL-gen layer to map conceptual table, view, column, etc. schema information to the database's actual system tables. The end result is that EdmGen.exe can retrieve database schema information in a provider agnostic fasion.

Also, the SQL generation layer within the sample provider has been enhanced to support the new canonical function capabilities added in Beta 2 of the ADO.NET Entity Framework.

If you're writing an ADO.NET provider for Orcas and you're not already in touch with me, please drop me a line at David (dot) Sceppa (at) microsoft (dot) com. Enjoy!