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Overview

The goal of the following walkthrough is to demonstrate a basic scenario for the use of Self Tracking Entities with Entity Framework. Self Tracking Entities is a feature included in the Microsoft Entity Framework Community Technology Preview 1, which consists of a new API added to the ObjectContext and ObjectSet classes (implemented as extension methods for the Feature CTP) and a code-generation template based on Text Template Transformation Toolkit (T4) technology included in Visual Studio.

Self Tracking Entities are domain classes that do not have any dependency on Entity Framework but include mechanisms that allow them to track changes on scalar and complex property values, references and collections within themselves, independently of the Entity Framework.

The first scenario we are trying to address with Self Tracking Entities is one in which a WCF service exposes a series of operations that return entity graphs, then a client application can manipulate that graph and submit the modifications to a service operation that validates and performs the updates to a database store using Entity Framework.

Requirements

  1. This walkthrough requires Visual Studio 2010 Beta 1
  2. The Microsoft Entity Framework Feature CTP1, that can be downloaded from here.
  3. A local SQL Server 2008 Express instance has to be installed as SQLEXPRESS. Otherwise, changes to the connection string in the web.config file or regenerating the database from the included SQL scripts may be necessary.
  4. Download and extract the initial solution attached to this post.

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