Short one this time. Craig Lee , a colleague of mine who works on the tools team, has just started blogging. He already has a number of posts, including an interesting one on keyboard shortcuts . Enjoy.

What are Stub Entities? A stub entity is a partially populated entity that stands in for the real thing. For example this: Category c = new Category {ID = 5}; is a stub entity. It has only the ID populated, which indicates this is a stub...

For well over a year now I've been talking about how it is possible with EF to write a provider that sits between the EF and the native database provider. There are lots of reasons why you might do this. Here are some examples, you could write a: Tracing...

Sometimes rather than writing this: var customer = ctx.Customers.First(c => c.ID == 5); You would rather write something like this: var customer = ctx.Customers.GetCustomerById(5); In .NET 4.0 this would be trivial to do by modifying the...

Customers often ask how to get from an Entity back to the ObjectContext . Now generally we don’t recommend trying this. But sometimes you really need a way to get to the ObjectContext . For example if you are in method and all you have is the Entity...

As of right now Enums are not in EF4. Now we will be listening to your feedback about Beta1, and making some adjustments, so you never know, but at the moment it doesn’t look like they will be supported. Yesterday though I came up with a workaround...

Some of our customers write code like this: ctx.AddToCustomers(customer); ctx.AddToProducts(product1); ctx.AddToProducts(product2); And expect the Entity Framework to issue 3 insert commands in the same order. Today the EF doesn’t preserve this sort of...

This is 22nd post in my ongoing series of Entity Framework Tips . If you want to do eager loading with the Entity Framework it is generally really easy, you simply write something like this: var results = from post in ctx.Posts.Include(“Comments”)...