The EF team has been working to become more agile and get new features into your hands faster. Our first two releases shipped as part of the .NET Framework but, as the result of an effort to release more often, in recent times we have been shipping a slew of “out-of-band” features that build...

Last year we wrote about some performance considerations when using TPT inheritance in the Entity Framework . We are pleased to announce that with the Microsoft Entity Framework June 2011 CTP we have released the first round of improvements, resulting in dramatic improvements in queries against TPT hierarchies...

This preview is no longer current. The features from this release are now included in Entity Framework 5 Beta 2 . We are excited to announce the availability of the Microsoft Entity Framework June 2011 CTP . This release includes many frequently requested features for both the Entity Framework and the...

This preview is no longer current. The features from this release are now included in Entity Framework 5 Beta 2 . This post will provide an overview of working with enumerated types (“ enums ”) introduced in the Entity Framework June 2011 CTP. We will start from discussing the general design of the feature...

This preview is no longer current. The features from this release are now included in Entity Framework 5 Beta 2 . Spatial data is one of the new features in Entity Framework June 2011 CTP . Spatial data allows users to represent locations on a map as well as points, geometric shapes, and other data which...

This preview is no longer current. The features from this release are now included in Entity Framework 5 Beta 2 . Microsoft Entity Framework June 2011 CTP is bringing support for Table-Valued Functions. TVFs are store functions capable of returning table-shaped values. TVFs are similar to Stored Procedures...

This preview is no longer current. The features from this release are now included in Entity Framework 5 Beta 2 .   Another feature added to the Entity Framework in the next release is support for consuming multiple result sets from a single stored procedure.   This scenario is commonly used...

Recently we published a new whitepaper to MSDN written by Scott Allen that explains what T4 is and how the Entity Framework uses it for code generation. It starts with an introduction to T4, covers editing and debugging tips, and shows how you can use it to customize and take total control of your generated...

Part 2: Provider Manifest This article outlines how to write the provider manifest for our Entity Framework Provider. We will walk through the different components needed, and look at some important parts of the code. Please make sure to read the intro article before you continue. When you are finished...

When considering how your application will connect to a data source, there’s a variety of technologies, patterns, and architectures to consider. Recently we published a “ Summary of Data Access Guidance ” on the MSDN Data Developer Center. If you want to drill deeper into the material...

Jarek Kowalski built a great caching and tracing toolkit that makes it easy to add these two features onto the Entity Framework. His code sample plugs in as a provider that wraps the original store provider you intend to use. This guide will help you get started using Jarek’s tools to enable caching...

Background EF4 supports the use of server-generated GUIDs, which has been a popular request since EF 3.5. Lee Dumond summarized his experience on how to use this feature very well. But you may find that the performance of server-generated GUIDs is not as fast as client-side generated GUIDs or even...

The "Entity Designer Database Generation Power Pack" is a downloadable addition to Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 which includes some new database generation technologies. The original Database Generation feature in the Entity Designer in VS 2010 is extensible via Windows Workflows and T4 Templates . This...

Model Defined Functions is a new feature coming in .NET 4.0. They are similar to SqlServer Table Value Functions because they are composable, so you can layer function calls and queries. The key difference is that they are declared in terms of the conceptual model, rather than the storage model so they...

An exciting new Entity Framework Designer feature in Visual Studio 2010 is the ability to generate DDL that will create a database that can store your entity data model. This feature is not only exciting because it brings a long overdue capability to life, but because it is fully extensible: You can...

This article is Part 2 of 3 – please see http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/07/21/update-model-a-question-of-identity-part-1-of-3.aspx for Part 1. In the last article I explained the principle that the C-side updates would be non-destructive. The “Update Model” code needs to decide when...

I propose to explain the reason behind some of the oddities of the “Update Model from Database” functionality and hopefully answer some common questions that come up about it. Before I get started let me note that this will be a fairly technical post split into three parts (I’ll post links to the...

Introduction In parts one and two of this four-part series, we discussed the file differences between EDMX & csdl, ssdl & msl files, and we looked at the model & code generation APIs available in the .Net Runtime. In Part three, we discuss validation of EDM models, and we look at view...

Introduction The Entity Data Model (EDM) Tools team has done a lot of work to enable a productive developer experience using the Microsoft Entity Framework. Model generation, model validation, and code generation are all plugged into the Visual Studio (VS) environment for a seamless user experience...

Background To set the stage for this article, do take a look at Exploring the Performance of the ADO.NET Entity Framework - Part 1 to learn more about pre-generating views and how they can reduce the startup time for applications that consume ADO.NET Entity Data Models. A while back, Jaroslaw Kowalski...