ADO.NET Blog

Entity Framework Links #4

Rowan Miller — Mon, 18 Mar 2013 17:50:00 GMT

This is the fourth post in a regular series to recap interesting articles, posts and other happenings in the EF world.

Entity Framework 6

Since our last EF Links post we announced the availability of EF6 Alpha 3. Of particular note, this preview introduced support of mapping to insert/update/delete stored procedures with Code First and connection resiliency to automatically recover from transient connection failures

There were a number of blog posts about new features coming in EF6:

Arthur Vickers blogged about the changes we checked in to support nested types and more for Code First.
Jiri Cincura posted a two part series about using custom conventions to help build the EF6 Firebird provider (Part 1, Part 2).
Rowan Miller wrote about writing your own Code First Migrations operations, configuring unmapped base types using Code First custom conventions, and mapping all private properties using Code First custom conventions.

We also shared some changes we are planning to make to custom conventions to improve this new feature. These changes will be included in a future preview.

Entity Framework 5

Julie Lerman appeared on Visual Studio Toolbox sharing Entity Framework tips and tricks. She also released a Getting Started with Entity Framework 5 course on Pluralsight

Rowan Miller published a two part series about extending and customizing Code First models at runtime (Part 1, Part 2).

EF Power Tools

We announced Beta 3 of the EF Power Tools. We also shared plans to provide a single set of tooling for EF, which means we won't be releasing an RTM version of the Power Tools. However, we will continue to maintain Beta releases of the Power Tools until the functionality becomes available in a pre-release version of the primary EF tooling.

SQL Database Connectivity and the Idempotency Issue

dpblogs — Mon, 11 Mar 2013 21:19:00 GMT

Applications connecting to SQL Server sometimes experience connections breaks due back-end failures. In general, they tend to be uncommon in LAN environment and more frequent in WAN topologies, when connectivity tends to be challenged by geographically dispersed links.

The introduction of Windows Azure SQL Database (WASD), which is a cloud-based SQL Server, added new availability and reliability challenges to the connectivity space. As a result, applications connecting to WASD witness frequent connection breaks due to backend reconfigurations and failures, forcing developers to include special logic for every database operation in order to handle these unexpected situations.

Basically, every time a connection drops, the application needs to decide to either reconnect (if it was a recoverable error (e.g. “server is busy)) or return an exception to the end user (if it was a non-recoverable one (e.g. “invalid password”)). In order to better handle these situations, developers can use a set of resources and best practices to avoid unwelcomed surprises after deploying applications to production. The Transient Fault Handling Framework for SQL Database, Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus & Cache is a free component that encapsulates all the logic required to handle most of the disconnections happening in SQL Database. For more information, please refer to its MSDN’s documentation here.

Also, for general resiliency guidance, please refer to Failsafe: Guidance for Resilient Cloud Architectures.

The Idempotency Issue

Now, special care must be considered when writing to a SQL Database table because a simple IUD (INSERT, UPDATE or DELETE) statement can potentially lead to data corruption. This is because there is no way to know if the statement was executed by the server immediately after a connection failure. Consider the code snippet below:

public class Data

{

public void Query(SqlConnection sqlConnection, string szQuery)

{

try

{

using (SqlConnection conn = new SqlConnection("…"))

{

conn.Open();

SqlCommand sqlCommand = new SqlCommand(szQuery, conn);

sqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery("UPDATE productList SET Price=Price*1.01");

}

catch (SqlException)

{

//...

throw;

}

If the connection fails immediately after sqlCommand.ExecuteNonQuery, there is no way for the application to know if it needs to reissue the query (the UPDATE didn’t execute) or not (the UPDATE executed) upon reconnection.

In order to avoid this problem, the application must track if a command was uniquely executed (idempotent command) or not. If it were, then, there is nothing to do, but if it weren’t, then the application can safely re-execute it. Currently, SQL Database does not offer any idempotency capability, transferring this responsibility to the application.

One way to track idempotent activities is to track all writing database operations in a table, like the one below. This way, the application can query the table to know if a command was executed or not.

Once the tracking information is available, there are many ways to query it in order to reissue the command. Personally, I like to encapsulate the code in stored procedures and confine the idempotent logic to the database. This way, it becomes transparent to the application and simplifies the use of the Transient Fault Handling Framework for SQL Database, Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus & Cache component. The snippet below exemplifies this approach:

CREATE PROCEDURE UpdateBranch

-- Add the parameters for the stored procedure here

@Operation AS UNIQUEIDENTIFIER,

@ParentId AS INT,

@BranchDbId as INT

BEGIN

DECLARE @COUNT_ID AS INT = 0

-- SET NOCOUNT ON added to prevent extra result sets from

-- interfering with SELECT statements.

SET NOCOUNT ON;

SET @COUNT_ID = (SELECT COUNT([ID]) FROM dbo.IdempotencyTracker WHERE ID = @Operation)

IF (@COUNT_ID = 0)

BEGIN

BEGIN TRANSACTION

UPDATE [dbo].[Branch] SET [BranchDbId] = @BranchDbId WHERE ParentId = @ParentId

INSERT INTO [dbo].[IdempotencyTracker] ([ID]) VALUES (@Operation)

COMMIT

END

In the scenario above, the application is responsible for generating and saving @Operation value in order to avoid losing track of the operation.

Concluding, although using the Transient Fault Handling Framework for SQL Database, Windows Azure Storage, Service Bus & Cache component is the right way to avoid connectivity issues in SQL Database, it’s not enough. You really need to implement an idempotency strategy in order to avoid data duplications or inconsistencies when writing to the database.

Luiz Santos

Sr. Program Manager

SQL Server Team

EF6 Alpha 3 Available on NuGet

Rowan Miller — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 18:00:00 GMT

A couple of months back we released EF6 Alpha 2, since then we've been adding new features, polishing existing features and fixing bugs. Today we are pleased to announce the availability of Alpha 3. EF6 is being developed in an open source code base on CodePlex, see our open source announcement for more details.

We Want Your Feedback

You can help us make EF6 a great release by providing feedback and suggestions. You can provide feedback by commenting on this post, commenting on the feature specifications linked below or starting a discussion on our CodePlex site.

Support

This is a preview of features that will be available in future releases and is designed to allow you to provide feedback on the design of these features. It is not intended or licensed for use in production. The APIs and functionality included in Alpha 3 are likely to change prior to the final release of EF6.

If you need assistance using the new features, please post questions on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.

Getting Started with Alpha 3

The Get It page provides instructions for installing the latest pre-release version of Entity Framework.

Note: In some cases you may need to update your EF5 code to work with EF6, see Updating Applications to use EF6.

What's Changed Since Alpha 2

The following features and changes have been implemented since Alpha 2:

Code First Mapping to Insert/Update/Delete Stored Procedures is now supported. The feature specification on our CodePlex site provides examples of using this new feature. This feature is still being implemented and does not include full Migrations support in Alpha 3.
Connection Resiliency enables automatic recovery from transient connection failures. The feature specification on our CodePlex site shows how to enable this feature and how to create your own retry policies.
We accepted a pull request from iceclow that allows you to create custom migrations operations and process them in a custom migrations SQL generator. This blog post provides an example of using this new feature.
We accepted a pull request from UnaiZorrilla to provide a pluggable pluralization & singularization service.
The new DbContext.Database.UseTransaction and DbContext.Database.BeginTransaction APIs enable scenarios where you need to manage your own transactions.

What Else is New in EF6

The following features and changes are included in Alpha 3 but have not changed significantly since Alpha 2:

Async Query and Save adds support for the task-based asynchronous patterns that were introduced in .NET 4.5. We've put together a walkthrough that demonstrates this new feature. You can also view the feature specification on our CodePlex site for more detailed information.
Custom Code First Conventions allow write your own conventions to help avoid repetitive configuration. We provide a simple API for lightweight conventions as well as some more complex building blocks to allow you to author more complicated conventions. We have a walkthough for this feature and the feature specification is on our CodePlex site.
Dependency Resolution introduces support for the Service Locator pattern and we've factored out some pieces of functionality that can be replaced with custom implementations. The feature specification provides details about this pattern, and we've put together a list of services that can be injected.
Code-Based Configuration - Configuration has traditionally been specified in a config file, EF6 also gives you the option of performing configuration in code. We've put together an overview with some examples and there is a feature specification with more details.
Configurable Migrations History Table - Some database providers require the appropriate data types etc. to be specified for the Migrations History table to work correctly. The feature specification provides details about how to do this in EF6.
Multiple Contexts per Database - In previous versions of EF you were limited to one Code First model per database when using Migrations or when Code First automatically created the database for you, this limitation is now removed. If you want to know more about how we enabled this, check out the feature specification on CodePlex.
Updated Provider Model - In previous versions of EF some of the core components were a part of the .NET Framework. In EF6 we've moved all these components into our NuGet package, allowing us to develop and deliver more features in a shorter time frame. This move required some changes to our provider model. We've created a document that details the changes required by providers to support EF6, and provided a list of providers that we are aware of with EF6 support.
Enums, Spatial and Better Performance on .NET 4.0 - By moving the core components that used to be in the .NET Framework into the EF NuGet package we are now able to offer enum support, spatial data types and the performance improvements from EF5 on .NET 4.0.
DbContext can now be created with a DbConnection that is already opened. Find out more about this change on the related work item on our CodePlex site.
Improved performance of Enumerable.Contains in LINQ queries. Find out more about this change on the related work item on our CodePlex site.
Default transaction isolation level is changed to READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT for databases created using Code First, potentially allowing for more scalability and fewer deadlocks. Find out more about this change on the related work item on our CodePlex site.
We accepted a pull request from AlirezaHaghshenas that provides significantly improved warm up time (view generation), especially for large models. View the discussion about this change on our CodePlex site for more information. We're also working on some other changes to further improve warm up time.
We accepted a pull request from UnaiZorrilla that adds a DbModelBuilder.Configurations.AddFromAssembly method. If you are using configuration classes with the Code First Fluent API, this method allows you to easily add all configuration classes defined in an assembly.

What's after Alpha 3

Alpha 3 contains all the major features we are planning to implement for the runtime in the EF6 release. We'll now turn our attention to polishing and completing these new features, implementing small improvements, fixing bugs and everything else to make EF6 a great release. We're still accepting pull requests too.

We've also been getting the EF Designer code base updated for the EF6 release and we hope to have a preview of the EF6 designer available soon.

If you want to try out changes we've made since the last official pre-release, you can use the latest signed nightly build. You can also check out our Feature Specifications and Design Meeting Notes to stay up to date with what our team is working on.

EF Power Tools Beta 3 Available

Glenn Condron — Wed, 30 Jan 2013 18:46:00 GMT

The Entity Framework Power Tools provide additional design-time tools in Visual Studio to help you develop using the Entity Framework. Beta 3 of the Power Tools is now available.

Where do I get it?

The Entity Framework Power Tools are available on the Visual Studio Gallery.

You can also install them directly from Visual Studio by selecting 'Tools -> Extension Manager...' then searching for "Entity Framework Power Tools" in the Online Gallery.

What's new in Beta 3?

Beta 3 is primarily a bug fix release and includes fixes for the following issues:

Future of the Power Tools

We are making an effort to consolidate and simplify the tooling for EF. As part of this effort we will be taking the functionality from the Power Tools and incorporating it into the EF Designer. There is a feature specification on our CodePlex site that outlines some of this work.

This means that we won't be releasing an RTM version of the Power Tools. However, we will continue to maintain Beta releases of the Power Tools until the functionality becomes available in a pre-release version of the EF Designer.

Support

This release is a preview of features that we are considering for a future release and is designed to allow you to provide feedback on the design of these features.

If you have a question, ask it on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.

Compatibility

The Power Tools are compatible with Visual Studio 2010 and 2012 and Entity Framework 4.2 thru 6.0.

There are some temporary limitations that we will address in a future release:

The 'Generate Views' functionality is currently disabled when using EF6.
The 'View Entity Data Model (Read-only)' functionality does not work when using EF6 in Visual Studio 2010.

What does it add to Visual Studio?

EF Power Tools Beta 3 is for Code First, model-first, and database-first development and adds the following context menu options to an 'Entity Framework' sub-menu inside Visual Studio.

When right-clicking on a C# project

Reverse Engineer Code First
This command allows one-time generation of Code First mappings for an existing database. This option is useful if you want to use Code First to target an existing database as it takes care of a lot of the initial coding. The command prompts for a connection to an existing database and then reverse engineers POCO classes, a derived DbContext, and Code First mappings that can be used to access the database.
- If you have not already added the EntityFramework NuGet package to your project, the latest version will be downloaded as part of running reverse engineer.
- The reverse engineer process by default produces a complete mapping using the fluent API. Items such as column name will always be configured, even when they would be correctly inferred by conventions. This allows you to refactor property/class names etc. without needing to manually update the mapping.
  - The Customize Reverse Engineer Templates command (see below) lets you customize how code is generated.
- A connection string is added to the App/Web.config file and is used by the context at runtime. If you are reverse engineering to a class library, you will need to copy this connection string to the configuration file of the consuming application(s).
- This process is designed to help with the initial coding of a Code First model. You may need to adjust the generated code if you have a complex database schema or are using advanced database features.
- Running this command multiple times will overwrite any previously generated files, including any changes that have been made to generated files.
Customize Reverse Engineer Templates
Adds the default reverse engineer T4 templates to your project for editing. After updating these files, run the Reverse Engineer Code First command again to reverse engineer POCO classes, a derived DbContext, and Code First mappings using your project's customized templates.
- The templates are added to your project under the CodeTemplates\ReverseEngineerCodeFirst folder.

When right-clicking on a code file containing a derived DbContext class

View Entity Data Model (Read-only)
Displays the Code First model in the Entity Framework designer.
- This is a read-only representation of the model; you cannot update the Code First model using the designer.
View Entity Data Model XML
Displays the EDMX XML representing the Code First model.
View Entity Data Model DDL SQL
Displays the DDL SQL to create the database targeted by the Code First model.
Generate Views
Generates pre-compiled views used by the EF runtime to improve start-up performance. Adds the generated views file to the containing project.
- View compilation is discussed in the Performance Considerations article on MSDN.
- If you change your model then you will need to re-generate the pre-compiled views by running this command again.

When right-clicking on an Entity Data Model (*.edmx) file

Generate Views
This is the same as the Generate Views command above except that, instead of generating pre-compiled views for a Code First model, it generates them for a model created using the EF Designer.

Entity Framework Links #3

Rowan Miller — Tue, 15 Jan 2013 23:14:51 GMT

This is the third post in a regular series to recap interesting articles, posts and other happenings in the EF world.

In December our team announced the availability of EF6 Alpha 2. Scott Guthrie also posted about this release. The announcement post provides details of the features included in this preview. Of particular note, we were excited to include a contribution from AlirezaHaghshenas that provides significantly improved warm up time (view generation), especially for large models. We’ve also got some more performance improvements coming in the next preview of EF6. The Roadmap page on our CodePlex site provides details of all the features we are planning to include in EF6, including those that are not yet implemented.

We shipped some fixes for the EF Designer in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1.

There were a number of good posts about Code First Migrations . Doug Rathbone blogged about using Code First Migrations in team environments. This one’s a bit older, but we wanted to point out a good post by Jarod Ferguson with some good tips for using Code First Migrations. Rowan Miller blogged about customizing the code that is scaffolded by Code First Migrations.

Devart announced Spatial data type support in their EF provider for Oracle.

Diego Vega posted details about a workaround for performance with Enumerable.Contains and non-Unicode columns against EF in .NET 4.0.

Julie Lerman published an article in MSDN Magazine about shrinking EF models with DDD bounded contexts. She also blogged about an issue she has seen with machine.config files messing up Code First provider factories.

In case you missed it, the EF Team is now on Twitter and Facebook, follow us to stay updated on a daily basis.

Rowan Miller
Program Manager
Entity Framework Team

EF6 Alpha 2 Available on NuGet

Rowan Miller — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 12:00:00 GMT

Around a month ago we released the first alpha of EF6. Today we are pleased to announce that availability of Alpha 2. EF6 is being developed in an open source code base on CodePlex, see our open source announcement for more details.

We Want Your Feedback

Support

This is a preview of features that will be available in future releases and is designed to allow you to provide feedback on the design of these features. It is not intended or licensed for use in production. The APIs and functionality included in Alpha 2 are likely to change significantly prior to the final release of EF6.

If you need assistance using the new features, please post questions on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.

Getting Started with Alpha 2

The Get It page provides instructions for installing the latest pre-release version of Entity Framework.

Note: In some cases you may need to update your EF5 code to work with EF6, see Updating Applications to use EF6.

What's Changed Since Alpha 1

The following features and changes have been implemented since Alpha 1:

We accepted a pull request from AlirezaHaghshenas that provides significantly improved warm up time (view generation), especially for large models. View the discussion about this change on our CodePlex site for more information. We're also working on some other changes to further improve warm up time.
We accepted a pull request from UnaiZorrilla that adds a DbModelBuilder.Configurations.AddFromAssembly method. If you are using configuration classes with the Code First Fluent API, this method allows you to easily add all configuration classes defined in an assembly.
Custom Code First Conventions have evolved significantly since Alpha 1 based on your feedback and further design. We have updated the walkthough for this feature and the feature specification on our CodePlex site. Custom Code First Conventions allow write your own conventions to help avoid repetitive configuration. We provide a simple API for lightweight conventions as well as some more complex building blocks to allow you to author more complicated conventions.
DbContext can now be created with a DbConnection that is already opened. Find out more about this change on the related work item on our CodePlex site.
Improved performance of Enumerable.Contains in LINQ queries. Find out more about this change on the related work item on our CodePlex site.
Default transaction isolation level is changed to READ_COMMITTED_SNAPSHOT for databases created using Code First, potentially allowing for more scalability and fewer deadlocks. Find out more about this change on the related work item on our CodePlex site.

What Else is New in EF6

The following features are included in Alpha 2 but have not changed significantly since Alpha 1:

Async Query and Save - EF6 now supports the task-based asynchronous patterns that were introduced in .NET 4.5. We've put together a walkthrough that demonstrates this new feature. You can also view the feature specification on our CodePlex site for more detailed information.
Multiple Contexts per Database (Formerly known as 'Multi-Tenant Migrations') - In previous versions of EF you were limited to one Code First model per database when using Migrations or when Code First automatically created the database for you, this limitation is now removed. If you want to know more about how we enabled this, check out the feature specification on CodePlex.
Configurable Migrations History Table - Some database providers require the appropriate data types etc. to be specified for the Migrations History table to work correctly. The feature specification provides details about how to do this in EF6.
Code-Based Configuration - Configuration has traditionally been specified in a config file, EF6 also gives you the option of performing configuration in code. We've put together an overview with some examples and there is a feature specification with more details.
Dependency Resolution - EF now supports the Service Locator pattern and we've factored out some pieces of functionality that can be replaced with custom implementations. The feature specification provides details about this pattern, and we've put together a list of services that can be injected.
Updated Provider Model - In previous versions of EF some of the core components were a part of the .NET Framework. In EF6 we've moved all these components into our NuGet package, allowing us to develop and deliver more features in a shorter time frame. This move required some changes to our provider model. We've created a document that details the changes required by providers to support EF6, and provided a list of providers that we are aware of with EF6 support.
Enums, Spatial and Better Performance on .NET 4.0 - By moving the core components that used to be in the .NET Framework into the EF NuGet package we are now able to offer enum support, spatial data types and the performance improvements from EF5 on .NET 4.0.

What's after Alpha 2

Our Roadmap provides details of all the features we are planning to implement in EF6, including the features we haven't started yet. If you want to try out the changes we've made since the last official pre-release, you can use the latest signed nightly build. You can also check out the Feature Specifications page on CodePlex for more information about new features that we are working on. You can also read our Design Meeting Notes to keep track of the evolving design of new features.

EF Fixes in Visual Studio 2012 Update 1

Rowan Miller — Tue, 27 Nov 2012 20:44:00 GMT

Visual Studio 2012 Update 1 is now available for download. This update includes three bug fixes for the Entity Framework Designer for Visual Studio 2012.

Nesting an .edmx file under a project folder would stop the code from being automatically regenerated when you saved changes to the edmx file. This was the highest voted issue on our CodePlex site and is fixed in VS2012 Update 1.
The changes we made to code generation for models created in the EF Designer in Visual Studio 2012 were causing significantly more virtual memory to be used when working with an EF model in Visual Studio. VS2012 Update 1 includes a fix that reduces virtual memory usage below what it was in Visual Studio 2010. More details about this issue are available on our CodePlex site.
The EF Designer in VS2012 introduced a new feature that updated facets of entity properties (such as length, precision, etc.) based on the facets of the corresponding database column. This is done to propagate changes the user made to the database to the entities. However, with some database providers, such as Oracle, the discrepancy is intentional and facet propagation was producing invalid models. VS2012 Update 1 disables facet propagation for all providers except SQL Server. More details about this issue are available on our CodePlex site.

Entity Framework Links #2

Rowan Miller — Mon, 26 Nov 2012 22:01:00 GMT

This is the second post in a regular series to recap interesting articles, posts and other happenings in the EF world.

The EF Team is now on Twitter and Facebook, follow us to stay updated on a daily basis.

Our team recently announced the release of EF6 Alpha 1, the first preview of the EF6 release. The announcement post contains a bunch of links to walkthroughs and specifications for the exciting new features. There are some features we plan to include in the final release of EF6 that aren't included in Alpha 1, see the Roadmap page for a complete list of EF6 features.

Brice Lambson started a blog series on using EF with third party databases, so far he has covered SQLite, MySQL and PostgreSQL.

At the //build/ conference, Rowan Miller presented on Building data centric applications for web, desktop and mobile with Entity Framework 5. You can get the source code from the session on his blog.

Julie Lerman blogged about making your way around the Open Source Entity Framework CodePlex Site and about her experience digging in to Multi-Tenant Migrations with EF6 Alpha.

We published some new content to the EF site, including Stored Procedures with Multiple Result Sets, WinForms Data Binding, Entity Splitting with the EF Designer, and Table Splitting with the EF Designer.

Rowan Miller
Program Manager
Entity Framework Team

EF6 Alpha 1 Available on NuGet

Rowan Miller — Tue, 30 Oct 2012 23:13:00 GMT

EF6 Alpha 1 Available on NuGet

A couple of months ago we released the RTM of EF5. Today we are pleased to announce the first alpha of EF6. EF6 is being developed in an open source code base on CodePlex, see our open source announcement for more details.

We Want Your Feedback

You can help us make EF6 a great release by providing feedback and suggestions. You can provide feedback by commenting on the feature specifications or starting a discussion on our CodePlex site.

Support

If you need assistance using the new features, please post questions on Stack Overflow using the entity-framework tag.

Getting Started with Alpha 1

The Get It page provides instructions for installing the latest pre-release version of Entity Framework.

Note: In some cases you may need to update your EF5 code to work with EF6. See Updating Applications to use EF6 for more details.

Note: Alpha 1 is a very early preview of EF6. The APIs and functionality included in Alpha 1 are likely to change significantly prior to the final release of EF6.

EF6 Alpha includes the following new features and changes.

Async Query and Save - EF6 now supports the task-based asynchronous patterns that were introduced in .NET 4.5. We've put together a walkthrough that demonstrates this new feature. You can also view the feature specification on our CodePlex site for more detailed information.
Custom Code First Conventions - You can now write custom conventions for Code First to help avoid repetitive configuration. We provide a simple API for lightweight conventions as well as some more complex building blocks to allow you to author more complicated conventions. There is a walkthough that covers both of these options and a feature specification on our CodePlex site.
Multiple Contexts per Database (Formerly known as 'Multi-Tenant Migrations') - In previous versions of EF you were limited to one Code First model per database when using Migrations or when Code First automatically created the database for you, this limitation is now removed. If you want to know more about how we enabled this, check out the feature specification on CodePlex.
Configurable Migrations History Table - Some database providers require the appropriate data types etc. to be specified for the Migrations History table to work correctly. The feature specification provides details about how to do this in EF6.
Code-Based Configuration - Configuration has traditionally been specified in a config file, EF6 also gives you the option of performing configuration in code. We've put together an overview with some examples and there is a feature specification with more details.
Dependency Resolution - EF now supports the Service Locator pattern and we've factored out some pieces of functionality that can be replaced with custom implementations. The feature specification provides details about this pattern, and we've put together a list of services that can be injected.
Updated Provider Model - In previous versions of EF some of the core components were a part of the .NET Framework. In EF6 we've moved all these components into our NuGet package, allowing us to develop and deliver more features in a shorter time frame. This move required some changes to our provider model. We've created a document that details the changes required by providers to support EF6, and provided a list of providers that we are aware of with EF6 support.
Enums, Spatial and Better Performance on .NET 4.0 - By moving the core components that used to be in the .NET Framework into the EF NuGet package we are now able to offer enum support, spatial data types and the performance improvements from EF5 on .NET 4.0.

What's after Alpha 1

If you want to try out the changes we've made since the last official pre-release, you can use the latest signed nightly build. You can also check out the Feature Specifications page on CodePlex for more information about new features that we are working on. You can also read our Design Meeting Notes to keep track of the evolving design of new features.

Entity Framework Links #1

Rowan Miller — Tue, 25 Sep 2012 21:17:56 GMT

The EF team is starting a regular series to recap interesting articles, posts and other happenings in the EF world. Here is the first one…

EF5

Our team recently announced the release of EF5. As part of the release we also updated the EF MSDN site, making it the go to place for EF content. As part of the update we created a short (2min) video that covers the different ways you can work with EF. We also created a bunch of walkthroughs and videos that can be found on the Getting Started page.

Julie Lerman blogged about the new EF Designer in Visual Studio 2012 that generates DbContext code by default.

Jason Zander posted a walkthrough showing EF5 and ASP.NET Web API in action. You can find the code from the walkthrough on CodePlex.

Rowan Miller demoed some new EF5 features in a 10min session for the Visual Studio launch. Rowan also blogged about calling stored procedures with multiple result sets in Code First and customizing ‘Reverse Engineer Code First’ in the EF Power Tools.

EF6 & Open Source

In addition to releasing EF5 we also announced that we will be developing EF6 in an open source code base. You can test out some of the features we’ve already checked in using the nightly signed builds.

Arthur Vickers from our team posted a 5 part series on contributing to the EF code base.

Rowan Miller
Program Manager
Entity Framework Team