compiler padawan

There are a number of places where you can read an introduction to the Entity Framework, listen to a podcast about it, or watch a screen cast or video of an interview. Even with these various resources, though, there are so many different data access...

As we wrap up VS 2008/.Net 3.5 SP1 and begin planning in earnest for the next release, we’ve been brainstorming various ways to improve our understanding of the problem space and to create feedback channels for our plans. I appreciate the feedback that...

Well, I guess it’s high time that I get down to business of sharing and explaining the “general purpose container object” for transporting graphs of entities along with change tracking information over WCF web services which I mentioned in this previous...

More than 5 years ago I joined what became the Entity Framework team and started an awesome adventure which taught me a lot and has given me many memories which I will treasure: Everything from a room of MVPs yelling at me (so much that one of them later...

Recently there have been some questions about compiled queries and how they relate to merge options.  As I looked into it I realized that I didn’t fully understand the details of how it all worked, so I walked down the hall and spent a little while...

I try to keep up with blog posts on the net which involve the entity framework, and this afternoon I came across this post where someone had been experimenting with EF4 and encountered some cases where things didn’t behave as they expected.  I started...

Once again a question in the EF MSDN Forum has prompted a blog post where I can give a more complete answer.  If I understand things correctly, the person asking the question wanted a simple way to add business logic hooks to their entities which...

Update 1/11/08: Between beta 2 and beta 3 there was a breaking change in the way events are fired during codegen. The metadata item that is being generated is no longer supplied as the "sender" of the event. Instead it comes in the TypeSource property...

Here's another topic which I believe is important to educate more folks on, but I just haven't had the time to carefully write something up. As I was answering a question on the forum today, I realized that the answer might be good to share a bit more...

This week on the ADO.Net pre-release forum, someone brought up an interesting relationship mapping scenario in this thread . Essentially the scenario is this: They have a table which represents an entity, call it Foo, and along with the other columns...

So, I've been thinking lately about serializing/remoting object graphs. The entity framework currently serializes an entire object graph when binary serialization is used but only serializes one entity at a time in XML/DataContract scenarios. I'm working...

Let me apologize up front for how long it has taken me to get back to this topic . What I can say, though, is that in the intervening interval I have devoted real time to studying agile design principles and domain driven design. Initially I thought...

Hey folks, It has been longer in arriving than I would have liked, but the June CTP of the Entity Framework is finally out. This includes a HUGE set of changes. I can't tell you how many times lately I've responded to a question on the forum or something...

In my last post I started a survey of problems with building data-centric web services. When we left our hero (you my intrepid entity framework programmer) things were looking pretty bleak. So far we’ve talked about the challenges. Now let’s talk about...

Spurred on both by the success of Damien Guard in using T4 to generate Linq to SQL code and of Jeff Reed from the EF team who built a prototype for using T4 to generate EF code, I recently hacked something up that makes it fairly easy to use T4 to generate...

During this week at PDC I had a lot of great discussions with folks who are working with the EF—some of them just evaluating it and others deep into projects built on it. As it turns out much of the feedback that I heard came as no surprise. One of the...

Quite some time ago I wrote a blog post about the fact that EF queries execute at the database rather than locally which means that if you add an object to the context or you modify an object already attached to the context, then a query won’t be based...

So I’ve begun drinking the kool-aide. Extension methods are frighteningly addictive and don’t even get me started on LINQ to Objects. Now I can take a class which is missing some functionality that would make it just right for a particular problem and...

Over the course of quite a few posts during the last several weeks I’ve shared source code that adds up to an implementation for EntityBag<T>. Piecing together a project from all those snippets, though, would be a pretty painful task, so I put the...

I continually find myself delaying posts on topics like this because I’d like to do a better job by the material, but given my harried schedule, it seems useful to at least get something out there whenever I can in the hope that it will be useful to someone...

In a previous post I explained how the Entity Framework supported custom construction of entity objects in Orcas beta 1 and before. Unfortunately, the whole mechanism was way too complex and brittle. So, we went back to the drawing board (or the whiteboard...

I can't take credit for the description of how to do this, but a very useful example was recently posted to the forum, and I wanted to make sure more people saw this/it is easy to find in the future. Also, Julie Lerman was mentioning to me today that...

In my last post I described the way the EntityBag class can be used. This time around we’ll take a look at the implementation of the top-level EntityBag class itself, and in subsequent posts we’ll dig into some supporting classes. The first thing to...

For this post, I’m going to set a new personal record for least prose/most code. We’re going to look at the core of ContextSnapshot, and the code includes extensive comments so we’ll mostly let it speak for itself. Constructors We have two different...

Recently I shared this post which has some code that demonstrates how to create an object matching the original state of an entity tracked in the ObjectStateManager. While this is useful, it’s more interesting to create the entire original value graph...