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 EF Sample Provider for SQL Server includes the following changes:

  • Support for SQL Server 2008
  • Support for new Canonical functions introduced in EF4
  • Addition of DDL capability to support ObjectContext.CreateDatabase, ObjectContext.CreateDatabaseScript, ObjectContext.DatabaseExists and ObjectContext.DeleteDatabase
  • Addition of a FunctionStubGenerator utility, that can be used for generating the stubs required for exposing the provider supported store functions
  • Translation of String.StartsWith, String.EndsWith and String.Contains to use the LIKE operator
  • Updates to the sample DDEX provider to work with Visual Studio 2010.

We hope you find this update useful in revising your providers to support the capabilities mentioned above, so that your provider supports the complete feature-set offered by Entity Framework 4.

Faisal Mohamood

Entity Framework Team